I can subscribe to your service for a specific fee on a monthly basis ($20/month say), and take the risk of losing that month's fee if your service or I make mistakes, or I can choose to drop another $20 mid-month, or anything for convenience.
Saying that the computer will "control" the billing and can run haywire tells me that I don't want to be anywhere near your pile of bad incentives.
If you don’t have a mechanism for enforcing hard caps, you don’t get to send customers a bill for unlimited amounts.
It works for some non-B2Bs.
If the CEO of the electric company didn't mandate circuit breakers, he should go to jail.
Google implemented caps because their competitors offered them. Before that, customers could choose one of several competitors, rent the GPUs at a fixed rate, or buy the GPUs and install them on-premises.
At no point was any law needed to solve any of this.
I know your post isn’t explicitly defending the platforms, but the arguments they use feel transparently flimsy.
What on earth is Simon whittering on about?
Even if we have a negotiated yearly contract for $X spend per year, maybe we’ll hit that spend in 6 months instead of 12. Having some kind of automated telemetry saying how we’re trending would be so useful.
I’ve gotten vague warnings from customer success people saying vaguely that, but without any warning of what’s truly happening. The more we abstract away from money (tokens, credits, etc), the more we need a way to translate right back to money, to see how close we’re getting to any limits over time.
I don’t want to find out in month 5 that the contract which was expected to cover a year is now going to run out in 14 days.
That said, the limits are accurate with Claude to a handful of cents over the last few months. I just don’t see it as a big deal.
Our Gemini API usage is also similarly accurate.
The LLM costs are way more accurate than the limits on our GCP env as a whole.
AWS, is a loot box... Tokens are just in game currency, and that sales person is just metrics that have identified your spending as making you a whale.
Your average CTO from the last decade turned a fixed cost into variable spending that looks like a mobile game.
Then the irony of whether or not your capped SaaS proxy SaaS product itself has hard caps.
Seriously. You all asked for this.
I can’t think of anyone saying they would hate for AWS to support hard spending caps.
Or if there was info that was after potentially horrible expensive operation.
That was blocking automated checking.
modeless•1h ago
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/cost-management/new-ear...
Edit: Ugh it's fake. Literally only works for four random services, unsupported for all the rest. Completely useless for all of my projects. Also dumb that the only supported term is "monthly" considering that months are different lengths, and that they don't bother to account for credits or discounts. Maybe next decade they'll get around to implementing something useful.
kingcauchy•49m ago
genxy•31m ago