you can set up a cloud function to monitor billing limits and automatically disable billing for a project if it exceeds the limits though

https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/control-us...

Google Cloud is easy to set up soft budget alerts via email though, something that I had to use third party service for with AWS.

There are several, rather tedious and incomplete, hacks that you can apply to attempt to prevent billable actions after limits are hit.

But to be frank - they're cop-outs for a real spending cap.

You'd hope these companies would address this themselves - but it's not profitable for them to resolve (it's somewhat involved and requires them to allow people to pay them less)... So my strong vote is to make the contracts that allow this sort of "un-cappable" spending for automated actions void in court.

This has been a major reason why I reach for OpenAI models before Gemini, but also why I'd rather use services like RunPod for training jobs. For a small boostrapped company like mine, it feels terrifyingly easy to rack up a company-ending AI bill.

The cloud companies try to limit these accidents through cranking your quotas down to nothing, but this also means that my small company can't just whip up 8xH100 easily without major ceremony, and I have routinely been rejected the GPUs quotas I needed for projects.

Accidentally leaving that kind of node on for the 24 hours that it might take to get an alert would rack up a $2,000+ bill, compared to $500 on RunPod, which will also stop the instance when you run out of money.

I've loved working with major cloud providers at growing VC-funded startups that have credits, TAMs and bigger budgets for errors. But hyperscalers are fairly difficult for a pre-scale bootstrapped business, and arguably not designed or optimized for it.

[0] https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/disable-bi... [1] https://support.terra.bio/hc/en-us/articles/360057589931-How...

There's also a practice that primarily seems to occur in china where stolen keys are resold via proxy services. A single key can provide access to thousands of users, racking up costs very fast (again, assuming the rate limits are high enough).