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100%. I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could have s

100%. I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could have set yours at like $5 or even $0 (free tier) and never run into that. One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget" turned out only to be an alarm, and even that they sent us 8 hours late, after $1600 of charges had been racked up. I responded in 20 minutes and shut it down. Google insisted we pay the full bill. After I wrote up a blog post on the situation and had the "publish" button warmed up, they finally relented and refunded us for the amount of time their alarm was delayed. Absolutely ridiculous that's not their policy to begin with...

zwischenzug 10y ago
Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was no one-click 'suspend at x$'. For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or something in between? There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling? Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an extremely dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user. Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one. AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources. If you think all of this through, it's really hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.
  - mrob 10y ago
    Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are minor problems compared to potential starvation and homelessness.
    - somecallitblues 10y ago
      Oh give me a break man. Starvation and homelessness. Deleting customers data is something you don't do. If they can't pay you can write off the bill. But people have committed suicides because of data loss. The parent post nailed it.
      - mrob 10y ago
        People have committed suicide over debts too. I'm not suggesting Amazon gets rid of unlimited liability accounts, only that they give customers the choice.
      - oh_sigh 10y ago
        If you're going to commit suicide if you lose your data, perhaps you shouldn't rely on the graciousness of a third party to save your data for free.
        michaelmrose 10y ago
        I think financial ruin was the reason not data loss.
      - joe563323 10y ago
        > But people have committed suicides because of data loss. Citation Required
  - unclebucknasty 10y ago
- frandroid 10y ago
  Sounds like a good business idea. Pay $10-50 a month for us to automatically disable your services which go over your stated budget. Free tier at 1 service.
  - zwischenzug 10y ago
    Until you get successful and Amazon copy your implementation.
    - ahmedfromtunis 10y ago
      Which is the point, right?
    - zenlikethat 10y ago
      It'd definitely be a gamble, but imagine pitching this idea at Amazon HQ. "We're going to roll out a fantastic new project to allow our customers to spend fewer dollars on our platform!" Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.
      - numlocked 10y ago
        That's really not true at Amazon. It's deep in their core values to cut customer expenses whenever possible, regardless of competitive pressures. I can't explain why they don't offer this feature, but I doubt it's because anyone is scared of a feature that could potentially help customers.
        vidarh 10y ago
        If that was true for AWS, their prices would be far lower pretty much across the board. One of the most amazing feats Amazon has pulled off is to convince people that AWS is cheap. They're cheap in the way that Apple are: Only if you need a feature-set (or name recognition..) that excludes the vast majority of the competitors from consideration. If/when you truly need that, then they're the right choice. There are plenty of valid reason to pick AWS. But they're very rarely the cheap choice.
- zwischenzug 10y ago
  If you think that solving this problem in a consumer-friendly way is beyond the wit of Amazon then I think you are wrong.
  - runamok 10y ago
    Completely. I will say amazon is usually very good about refunding money if you made a mistake or got hacked so in that sense their customer service is pretty good. One time we had literally 1 million cloudwatch metrics get created because we were monitoring mongodb databases and a CPAN test was creating test DBs and not deleting them and we were not ignoring dbs created with names like test_* when creating the metrics. Another time an outside developer committed a root credential on a public repo in github to a (basically) unused amazon account. Both times they refunded the costs. Not sure if that was because we were paying tens of thousands a month though to get this service though!
    - joe563323 10y ago
      That is charity. Why not just put the <SHUTDOWN LIMIT EXCEEDED> check mark which will solve the issue entirely.
      - ec109685 10y ago
        What thing would they shut down first?
xeromal 10y ago
I'm pretty sure Azure had that the last time I used it.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  Nope. They have billing alerts ('beta') and used to offer a prepaid account type that they have discontinued for new customers (some may still have grandfathered accounts). Closest thing now is the MSDN credit. It doesn't require a credit card and the account auto-suspends when you hit it. Problem with the MSDN credit is that it is for non-production only (and they reserve the right to kill anything they consider "production"). They should really offer prepaid again or bill caps. But Microsoft is too busy copying AWS to consider that they can do better than AWS.
  - altano 10y ago
    Azure has spending limits for the subscription which is what is being discussed.
  - soverance 10y ago
    uh.... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/
forgottenacc57 10y ago
Amazon lets you set a cost limit in your account. Look it up.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  I did. They don't. They offer billing alerts, have a budget tracker thingy, but have no actual automated caps. Closest thing you can do is write one yourself using the AWS APIs.
  - seoseokho 10y ago
    Yeah, gotta monitor daily
- daveguy 10y ago
  That is only for automated reporting and alerts. It does not allow you to actually limit your expenses.
  - eropple 10y ago
    IIRC, it can fire off to a SNS topic; you can burn down your stuff to your heart's content.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  Billing alerts that are simply a notification you exceeded $X is not any sort of limit, particularly when they may take hours to arrive.
kzisme 10y ago
Is the free tier even worth trying out? I went to look into it previously, but stopped before entering my CC info. Can it incur charges even if you've set up the server to only be a free tier?
- tylerjd 10y ago
  Yes, when I was still in high school, I had set up a Munin graphing node on AWS. Well, what I didn't realize at the time was that Munin likes to use a lot of disk IO every time it writes out the graphs. AWS charges for I/O on their SAN (not on local disks, but the free tier doesn't come with local disks), and so I ended up with a $150 bill and only use them now for Route53 (DNS hosting, it is fantastic for that), and S3/Glacier for archival storage. It is worth trying if just to gain knowledge on AWS. But for hosting, I'd say DigitalOcean
  - mnordhoff 10y ago
    The newer EBS types don't charge per I/O operation. (Provisioned IOPS types charge for the speed you theoretically can do, but don't charge for the ops you do do.) https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/
- jdwithit 10y ago
  Depends what you want to get out of it. I used it for a year to host a crappy blog that got trivial amounts of traffic. It's perfectly fine for its primary use case of getting your feet wet in the AWS ecosystem, learning what all the different features are for, and how to manage them. If you want to do any "real work" you'll blow past what the free tier offers, but that's ok with me. Yes, you can incur charges if you exceed what's covered by the free tier. Not all AWS services even have a free tier, and those that do are severely limited (1 micro instance, 5GB of S3 storage, etc). You're not off in some sandboxed environment where they just shut you down if you go over the limits. It's more like a monthly credit of $X for the first 12 months of your account. To cover my ass, I set a really low billing alert threshold. Like "email me if my monthly bill ever projects to exceed $1".
__jal 10y ago
Yep. I had a personal $400 learning experience with Amazon. They did refund it. My last company had a low-5-figure surprise a few years ago. Some of that could be considered their fault (alerts were sent to someone on vacation), but again, the refusal to allow the option of a "hit a limit, pull the plug" option is what causes this.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Of course, there's also the opposite scenario "So here we were, having the best sales day in our history, and suddenly Amazon pulled the plug on our servers because we went over our authorized limit! We lost 5-figures of sales that day. Sure, they sent us warnings, but the alerts went to someone on vacation... but why wouldn't they let us exceed the limit for a bit before they pull the plug"
  - tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
    nobody says that the hard limit should be there for everybody, but I SHOULD be able to hit a checkbox that says "no matter what happens, runaway CPU, somebody DDOSing me with traffic, runaway disk, I do not want to be responsible for more than $x/month" Personally this is the main reason why I have never considered using AWS for my small projects, but maybe this is an intentional choice by Amazon, to keep away "hobbyists" and only go after companies where an extra $1k in AWS bills this month is just a blip on the radar...
bunderbunder 10y ago
At least last I checked, Azure offers this.
jopsen 10y ago
> I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. It's not unlimited liability, most of their services have limits imposed. If you've scaled any service to thousands of machines you'll quickly find out that they stop you at 20-30 machines or so. Then you have to contact support to get the limit increased. Sure you can still rake up an unpleasant bill. But there are limits :)
- vidarh 10y ago
  But even the default limits are high enough that there are plenty of companies that could at least in theory bankrupt themselves with it. Especially because there is no hard total cap, and so many services have high enough limits that you can get really nasty shocks if any one of them is maxed out. Even more so if you e.g. make use of different instance types (separate limits) in different regions (separate limits) and a wide range of services (separate limits). And I've done work for clients that have requested really big increases because of both realistic and unrealistic expectations of handling traffic peaks. E.g. one client asked for an increase to 100 instances of 2-3 different types in a few regions to be prepared to handle a couple of days of high traffic. If said event had happened, they scaled it all up, and somehow didn't take them down again, it'd only take a few days of charges for them to be insolvent at their then-current funding level. So you're right, there are limits, but limits or not doesn't matter if it's high enough that it can make you go out of business. Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever gone out of business because AWS was unwilling to forgive a "surprise" bill. I'd be inclined to assume that they're willing to stretch quite far to avoid that, given that they seem to be very good about it. But I'd also not want to stake my business on hoping Amazon will be charitable about something like that.
ubercow13 10y ago
Does this not work as a hard limit for App Engine? [0] It also says here [1] that 'Spending limits are set for paid apps and cannot be exceeded.' [0] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
- arcticfox 10y ago
  I'm not sure because we don't use AppEngine, but these seem like two important caveats: > Important: Spending limits are not supported in the App Engine flexible environment > You may still be charged for usage of other Google Cloud Platform resources beyond the spending limit.
vgt 10y ago
Hey there, I work on Google Cloud. Did you set a billing alert? Google BigQuery has proactive "cost controls" that won't let you go overboard, whereas billing alerts are just that - alerts.
wusher87 10y ago
It's not actually unlimited liability. Every AWS service has a set of default limits, and you must request AWS raise those limits before you can provision additional resources. I agree with your larger point, but you're going to be surprised by a $500 bill, not a $500,000 bill.

zwischenzug 10y ago

Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was no one-click 'suspend at x$'. For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.

Pyxl101 10y ago
It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or something in between? There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling? Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an extremely dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user. Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one. AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources. If you think all of this through, it's really hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.
- mrob 10y ago
  Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are minor problems compared to potential starvation and homelessness.
  - somecallitblues 10y ago
    Oh give me a break man. Starvation and homelessness. Deleting customers data is something you don't do. If they can't pay you can write off the bill. But people have committed suicides because of data loss. The parent post nailed it.
    - mrob 10y ago
      People have committed suicide over debts too. I'm not suggesting Amazon gets rid of unlimited liability accounts, only that they give customers the choice.
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      If you're going to commit suicide if you lose your data, perhaps you shouldn't rely on the graciousness of a third party to save your data for free.
      - michaelmrose 10y ago
        I think financial ruin was the reason not data loss.
    - joe563323 10y ago
      > But people have committed suicides because of data loss. Citation Required
- unclebucknasty 10y ago
frandroid 10y ago
Sounds like a good business idea. Pay $10-50 a month for us to automatically disable your services which go over your stated budget. Free tier at 1 service.
- zwischenzug 10y ago
  Until you get successful and Amazon copy your implementation.
  - ahmedfromtunis 10y ago
    Which is the point, right?
  - zenlikethat 10y ago
    It'd definitely be a gamble, but imagine pitching this idea at Amazon HQ. "We're going to roll out a fantastic new project to allow our customers to spend fewer dollars on our platform!" Not saying Jevon's Paradox wouldn't kick in, but the friction of convincing businesses to work on tools to allow their customers to spend _less_ money is high.
    - numlocked 10y ago
      That's really not true at Amazon. It's deep in their core values to cut customer expenses whenever possible, regardless of competitive pressures. I can't explain why they don't offer this feature, but I doubt it's because anyone is scared of a feature that could potentially help customers.
      - vidarh 10y ago
        If that was true for AWS, their prices would be far lower pretty much across the board. One of the most amazing feats Amazon has pulled off is to convince people that AWS is cheap. They're cheap in the way that Apple are: Only if you need a feature-set (or name recognition..) that excludes the vast majority of the competitors from consideration. If/when you truly need that, then they're the right choice. There are plenty of valid reason to pick AWS. But they're very rarely the cheap choice.
zwischenzug 10y ago
If you think that solving this problem in a consumer-friendly way is beyond the wit of Amazon then I think you are wrong.
- runamok 10y ago
  Completely. I will say amazon is usually very good about refunding money if you made a mistake or got hacked so in that sense their customer service is pretty good. One time we had literally 1 million cloudwatch metrics get created because we were monitoring mongodb databases and a CPAN test was creating test DBs and not deleting them and we were not ignoring dbs created with names like test_* when creating the metrics. Another time an outside developer committed a root credential on a public repo in github to a (basically) unused amazon account. Both times they refunded the costs. Not sure if that was because we were paying tens of thousands a month though to get this service though!
  - joe563323 10y ago
    That is charity. Why not just put the <SHUTDOWN LIMIT EXCEEDED> check mark which will solve the issue entirely.
    - ec109685 10y ago
      What thing would they shut down first?

xeromal 10y ago

I'm pretty sure Azure had that the last time I used it.

Someone1234 10y ago
Nope. They have billing alerts ('beta') and used to offer a prepaid account type that they have discontinued for new customers (some may still have grandfathered accounts). Closest thing now is the MSDN credit. It doesn't require a credit card and the account auto-suspends when you hit it. Problem with the MSDN credit is that it is for non-production only (and they reserve the right to kill anything they consider "production"). They should really offer prepaid again or bill caps. But Microsoft is too busy copying AWS to consider that they can do better than AWS.
- altano 10y ago
  Azure has spending limits for the subscription which is what is being discussed.
- soverance 10y ago
  uh.... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/

forgottenacc57 10y ago

Amazon lets you set a cost limit in your account. Look it up.

Someone1234 10y ago
I did. They don't. They offer billing alerts, have a budget tracker thingy, but have no actual automated caps. Closest thing you can do is write one yourself using the AWS APIs.
- seoseokho 10y ago
  Yeah, gotta monitor daily
daveguy 10y ago
That is only for automated reporting and alerts. It does not allow you to actually limit your expenses.
- eropple 10y ago
  IIRC, it can fire off to a SNS topic; you can burn down your stuff to your heart's content.
fweespeech 10y ago
Billing alerts that are simply a notification you exceeded $X is not any sort of limit, particularly when they may take hours to arrive.

kzisme 10y ago

Is the free tier even worth trying out? I went to look into it previously, but stopped before entering my CC info. Can it incur charges even if you've set up the server to only be a free tier?

tylerjd 10y ago
Yes, when I was still in high school, I had set up a Munin graphing node on AWS. Well, what I didn't realize at the time was that Munin likes to use a lot of disk IO every time it writes out the graphs. AWS charges for I/O on their SAN (not on local disks, but the free tier doesn't come with local disks), and so I ended up with a $150 bill and only use them now for Route53 (DNS hosting, it is fantastic for that), and S3/Glacier for archival storage. It is worth trying if just to gain knowledge on AWS. But for hosting, I'd say DigitalOcean
- mnordhoff 10y ago
  The newer EBS types don't charge per I/O operation. (Provisioned IOPS types charge for the speed you theoretically can do, but don't charge for the ops you do do.) https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/
jdwithit 10y ago
Depends what you want to get out of it. I used it for a year to host a crappy blog that got trivial amounts of traffic. It's perfectly fine for its primary use case of getting your feet wet in the AWS ecosystem, learning what all the different features are for, and how to manage them. If you want to do any "real work" you'll blow past what the free tier offers, but that's ok with me. Yes, you can incur charges if you exceed what's covered by the free tier. Not all AWS services even have a free tier, and those that do are severely limited (1 micro instance, 5GB of S3 storage, etc). You're not off in some sandboxed environment where they just shut you down if you go over the limits. It's more like a monthly credit of $X for the first 12 months of your account. To cover my ass, I set a really low billing alert threshold. Like "email me if my monthly bill ever projects to exceed $1".

__jal 10y ago

Yep. I had a personal $400 learning experience with Amazon. They did refund it. My last company had a low-5-figure surprise a few years ago. Some of that could be considered their fault (alerts were sent to someone on vacation), but again, the refusal to allow the option of a "hit a limit, pull the plug" option is what causes this.

Johnny555 10y ago
Of course, there's also the opposite scenario "So here we were, having the best sales day in our history, and suddenly Amazon pulled the plug on our servers because we went over our authorized limit! We lost 5-figures of sales that day. Sure, they sent us warnings, but the alerts went to someone on vacation... but why wouldn't they let us exceed the limit for a bit before they pull the plug"
- tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
  nobody says that the hard limit should be there for everybody, but I SHOULD be able to hit a checkbox that says "no matter what happens, runaway CPU, somebody DDOSing me with traffic, runaway disk, I do not want to be responsible for more than $x/month" Personally this is the main reason why I have never considered using AWS for my small projects, but maybe this is an intentional choice by Amazon, to keep away "hobbyists" and only go after companies where an extra $1k in AWS bills this month is just a blip on the radar...

bunderbunder 10y ago

At least last I checked, Azure offers this.

jopsen 10y ago

> I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. It's not unlimited liability, most of their services have limits imposed. If you've scaled any service to thousands of machines you'll quickly find out that they stop you at 20-30 machines or so. Then you have to contact support to get the limit increased. Sure you can still rake up an unpleasant bill. But there are limits :)

vidarh 10y ago
But even the default limits are high enough that there are plenty of companies that could at least in theory bankrupt themselves with it. Especially because there is no hard total cap, and so many services have high enough limits that you can get really nasty shocks if any one of them is maxed out. Even more so if you e.g. make use of different instance types (separate limits) in different regions (separate limits) and a wide range of services (separate limits). And I've done work for clients that have requested really big increases because of both realistic and unrealistic expectations of handling traffic peaks. E.g. one client asked for an increase to 100 instances of 2-3 different types in a few regions to be prepared to handle a couple of days of high traffic. If said event had happened, they scaled it all up, and somehow didn't take them down again, it'd only take a few days of charges for them to be insolvent at their then-current funding level. So you're right, there are limits, but limits or not doesn't matter if it's high enough that it can make you go out of business. Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever gone out of business because AWS was unwilling to forgive a "surprise" bill. I'd be inclined to assume that they're willing to stretch quite far to avoid that, given that they seem to be very good about it. But I'd also not want to stake my business on hoping Amazon will be charitable about something like that.

ubercow13 10y ago

Does this not work as a hard limit for App Engine? [0] It also says here [1] that 'Spending limits are set for paid apps and cannot be exceeded.' [0] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas

arcticfox 10y ago
I'm not sure because we don't use AppEngine, but these seem like two important caveats: > Important: Spending limits are not supported in the App Engine flexible environment > You may still be charged for usage of other Google Cloud Platform resources beyond the spending limit.

vgt 10y ago

Hey there, I work on Google Cloud. Did you set a billing alert? Google BigQuery has proactive "cost controls" that won't let you go overboard, whereas billing alerts are just that - alerts.

wusher87 10y ago

It's not actually unlimited liability. Every AWS service has a set of default limits, and you must request AWS raise those limits before you can provision additional resources. I agree with your larger point, but you're going to be surprised by a $500 bill, not a $500,000 bill.