is that meant to sound self-deprecating? Weird article.
What I agree on (top comment): there should be laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap.
That's what prevented me from using Firebase for a hobby project in 2023.
The only available killswitch was some weird workaround with a Google Sheets monitoring the bill and triggering an action (give or take latency) when it exceeded some amount...
ehm, no thanks.
But yes, these platforms should default to hard caps that you have to explicitly disable.
joshstrange•38m ago
Perhaps some kind of "we only let your bill be X% higher than the rolling average for your account" coupled with "First time you hit $10, $50, $100, $500, $1K .... firebreaks, alarms coupled with auto-stop/shutdown if you don't respond with a day or two". All of this would be available to turn off so it would just serve as a safety net.
luhn•28m ago
fragmede•27m ago
sciurus•20m ago
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/sign-i...
ntcho•25m ago
traceroute66•22m ago
Absolutely.
As I said on here a few days ago in a discussion about AWS finally launching hard caps ... I really don't buy the stories the US providers tell you that "its too difficult" or "what if you suddenly go viral".
The "viral" bit is easily solved through basic monitoring of metrics that everybody should be doing. I believe the cool-kids give it the fancy name of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). All you need to do is top-up your balance / adjust your cap if your metrics are trending upwards for an explainable reason. Its not rocket science. Just set a reasonable yet affordable buffer above your most ambitiously expected figures.
As for the "too difficult" that's just a lie. Its 2026. You're a cloud provider. You've got the infrastructure. You've got pre-existing APIs.
Credit card providers don't give people unlimited spending, they set a hard limit based on credit risk, I don't see why cloud providers should just let the numbers roll.
There are at least six providers in Europe I can name who offer hard caps on their services. So it is possible.