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The thing I really want out of these services is the ability to set a payment cap. It’s probably never going to be an issue, but I have anxiety, and I can’t sle
by moksly 7y ago
The thing I really want out of these services is the ability to set a payment cap. It’s probably never going to be an issue, but I have anxiety, and I can’t sleep easily knowing that if I fuck up, if someone sinister abuses my application or whatever I may be stuck with a giant bill.
- aamederen 7y agoHere's a story about why you are right to be anxious: https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-less-than-72-hours-307490bd24d https://hackernoon.com/how-we-spent-30k-usd-in-firebase-in-l...
- floatingatoll 7y agoThis was discussed on HN (237 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661391 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17661391
- StillBored 7y agoThese stories are everywhere. A couple months ago, it hit an associate of mine pretty hard, he moved a small python monitoring and statistics application off a laptop in the office to AWS. A couple weeks later he came back and discovered that it had burned up a few thousand $'s in storage and transfer fees for what normally was a couple hundred MBs of data a day being passed around and a some database updates. Since it wasn't really worth debugging what went "wrong" it got chalked up as a learning experience and moved back to the laptop where its happily running. If it dies/whatever its no big deal, just a git clone;./runme; and it rebuilds the whole database and creates another web facing interface. The IaaS guys are masters of marketing. They have convinced everyone that their offerings are less expensive and more reliable, which repeatedly is proven to be false in all but the most dynamic of situations. In this cases its saving $7.99 a month over a unlimited site shared hosting godaddy/whatever plan. Just in case it might need to scale a lot, in which case your going to be paying hundreds if not thousands in surge pricing. No thanks...
- tnolet 7y agoNot sure what happened to your associate but this sounds way, way out there. I run a fairly resource intensive SaaS on AWS (lots of background jobs generating data) and we barely go over $600 a month. People should not be scared of by these anecdotes, however true they may be. It’s perfectly possible to run a very cost effective business on AWS.
- C14L 7y agoThat's great. But you are always just one unfortunate bug or mis-configuration away from having it happen. Sure, to most people it will never happen. But the risk is always there. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
- Mirioron 7y agoIt's possible to write bug-free code, but would you bet your financial future on your ability to write bug-free code?
- D2187645 7y agoStarting to think the reason we arnt working for google/aws is we make mistakes. Whereas engineers at those companies just dont make mistakes, therefor they assume that billing caps are not necessary. Such is our lot in life.
- Mirioron 7y agoI think the bigger difference (other than a potential skill difference) is rather that they're more willing to take these risks. The ones that are good at it and succeed will rise to the top!
- tluyben2 7y agoBug free is a not realistic but if you are a programmer and definitely if you are a tech founder you definitely should be willing to bet your financial future on writing reasonably low bug code. If you are a programmer, I kind of find the comment puzzling; maybe I am reading you wrong, but you seem to be saying that you are writing code for some company while being happy to commit it and not care if the company loses money if your code is bad? As you would not bet on your work yourself, but you do not mind your employer paying you for it and as such betting some of it’s financial future on your work? Sorry if I misunderstood your comment.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoThat's not a bug... that's a 'feature'. Interestingly, AWS will not cut you off for non-payment (we had an issue with finance and were 250k in the red by the time we got the first 'Is there any issues over there?' email)
- oneshot908 7y agoAnd even as an employee, if you tell them over and over again that customers keep asking for that feature, they disagree with you over and over again.
- akudha 7y agoThis sounds like a short term 'thinking'. If there are a few stories on the internet (and there are some in this very thread) about developers getting burned by this 'feature', it would turn off a lot of potential users in the future. It would make sense to be transparent and give tools to strictly control usage/billing - both in terms of trust and money.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoIt is. I'm using free there to build and host my projects. If/when I exceed the free tier I'm not making a billing account unless I can set a max bill. I'll sooner rewrite everything to run on bare metal that has a fixed monthly cost.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoI pay my $5 for linode (expanded swap to 2GB, it's SSD backed) and just run Caprover... I'd rather not deal with AWS's billing (even their billing dashboards are delayed by 24 hours)
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y ago
- alex-olivier 7y agoDo-able today with GCP Billing
- Havoc 7y agoI thought GCP is alerts not capping?
- alex-olivier 7y agoThe 'official' method is programmatically DIY! https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disable_billing_to_stop_usage https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa...
- throwlaplace 7y agohaha >Warning: This example removes billing from your project, shutting down all resources. this is the digital equivalent of literally pulling the plug. i wonder how long it takes for GCP to register that you've pulled billing though? in some cases i'm sure even milliseconds could make a large difference.
- Havoc 7y agoDamn that's ugly. I'm luckily still on Azure's MSDN tier...which is hardcapped to 150 bucks.
- zelly 7y agoThis is ridiculous. I'm guessing a huge revenue source is going after businesses for long-tail billing spikes. Not only do I have to worry about bad code causing a huge bill, I also have to worry about the quality of code (or config) that emergency stops the billing. I wonder if you can sign up with a pre-paid credit card and use a fake name.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- tmpz22 7y ago
- brenden2 7y agoIt's cheap insurance to create an LLC to protect yourself from extreme situations for this kind of thing. Worst case the LLC goes defunct, but you won't be personally liable. https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/limited-liability-protection-llcs-a-50-state-guide.html https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/limited-liability-pr... EDIT: This comment is based on the assumption that the parent was trying to start a side business. I'm certainly not advocating fraud.
- throwlaplace 7y agowut? are you suggesting that if there's a cost overrun you just shutdown the LLC? that sounds like a loop that couldn't possibly be true? when you sign TOS you agree to be responsible for service fees. if being an LLC indemnifies against these sorts of charges it would also indemnify you against other legitimate fees? take out a business credit card and cash advance and then close the LLC? free money!
- toolz 7y agoIt basically does work like that, however the law is almost never that cut and dry. The situation you're describing would have the person benefiting from the money as being personally liable because that person presumably would be taking the cash advance for self-interest instead of taking the loan in the interest of the business.
- mushufasa 7y agomore or less, yes. bankruptcy courts vary by location. the whole point of a 'limited liability corporation' is you not being personally liable. BUT if you have 'malicious intent' -- meaning you build an llc on purpose to overrun costs and get free stuff, you CAN and WILL be sued and face penalties. cause that's just cut-and-dry fraud.
- tluyben2 7y agoCompanies are doing this all the time and not prosecuted (or prosecuted and not found guilty); they just do not make it obvious. So the ‘will’ is not that cut and dry really; even in countries where bankruptcies are not normal and frowned upon (like NL), there are many companies only created to spend money and killed off when it runs out. On paper they look like real businesses. Also it is not unusual to put employees in a separate llc and kill that when the money runs out; again that happens a lot, even with the intent of doing that. As long as it looks good on the outside, it works. I cannot stand it personally but there are not many solutions to resolve it; you cannot read the minds of the founders to get their real intentions.
- clSTophEjUdRanu 7y agoThis makes me anxious as well.
- jskrablin 7y agoSet budget alerts. And check what's going on if they start going off. Or think again if you really need 'infinitely scalable bla blah' for personal project on a small budget.
- vineyardmike 7y agoReal answer here.
- cobookman 7y agoaws lightsale and digital ocean are great alternatives for personal projects
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoI do not want the failure mode to be the expensive case.
- spyspy 7y agoYou can deploy with a —max-instances flag to prevent infinite scaling. This has been a feature since the Cloud Run beta and has been in GAE forever.
- alasdair_ 7y agoOne issue in GAE is that it can take 24 hours to update the billing cap. So if you happen to get a ton of fantastic press coverage one day, your site will go down and there is literally nothing you can do to fix it.
- skj 7y agoSeems unrelated to capping instance counts, which I assume would go into effect very quickly. (I work on GCP but not this product)
- Thaxll 7y agoIt's pretty complicated to do that on every services, imagine for any service they would have to call an API to get the $$ remaining , compute before scaling / creation if you have enough ect ...
- patentatt 7y agoIf you wanted to be that precise, sure. But something like an hourly ‘calculate what I owe’ and compare it to a cap is not a big stretch of the imagination, and would suffice for many use cases.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoA ml app could scale massively in an hour.
- blhack 7y agoIt seems absolutely within amazon's technical ability to allow you to prepay for usage, and then evaluate your use on a per-hour basis. I have a side project that uses AWS at the moment, and while stuff like serverless RDS instances are really cool, it scares me that somehow amazon is going to have a bug which empties my checking account. I've read as much of the documentation as I can find and have done everything I seem to be able to to prevent this from happening according to AWSs documentation, but it sill worries me. In fact here is a banking feature I'd love to see: per merchant daily spending limits. I would love to be able to tell my bank that amazon is allowed access to up to $20/day or something of money until they get rate limited and I have to intervene. Uh oh I better stop before I start advocating for the blockchain, haha
- thorntonedgar 7y agoCheckout privacy.com you can set merchant daily, monthly or yearly spending limits.
- wickoff 7y agoIn Europe revolut has virtual cards with monthly spending limits. Cash App must have a similar feature in the US.
- danenania 7y agoI believe you could accomplish this with Brex using virtual cards and per-card spending limits.
- dannyw 7y agoThen don’t get infinitely scaling services and get a Vultr instance, where your costs are fixed.
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIt would be nice to have three caps: 1. notify me so I can ok continued service 2. start throttling usage 3. turn off if #1 has not responded and set new limits etc.
- spookthesunset 7y agoA “cap” feature isn’t as easy to implement as you’d think. What happens when you hit the cap? Does it start shutting down instances? If yes, which ones and in what order? And don’t say “I don’t care” because you do care—you are allowing your provider to basically cause an outage in your service. If you do allow some kind of ordered shutdown of service, what is the UX going to look like? What is the API going to look like? Having a cap is not an easy feature to design or implement. And on a backlog, it is going to be a “multi quarter, low impact” item—meaning it will never get built.
- arama471 7y agoWhy not allow people to set a cap that disables everything set to that billing method once it's been reached? That seems to be the use case that people are saying is missing from cloud offerings.
- spookthesunset 7y agoYeah after I posted I realized that once you hit your cap, that’s it you are done. Still, I bet there is a lot of companies that might be more upset with the provider shutting everything down even if they had set up a cap.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoI imagine most of those companies can afford to have some overages built into their caps. They should also be able to afford the developer time to create fallback behavior, and graceful degradation of services.
- manigandham 7y agoThings like storage (disks or S3) continue to incur costs even if the instance is shutdown. Should they just delete your data too?
- akudha 7y agoWhat is the API going to look like? Maybe just a simply array with the list of services to be shut down in the order provided? This should be enough for hobby and smaller projects, bigger projects will have plans/people in place anyway. It is not that they can't do it - we are talking about a company with insane technical ability and resources. It is just that they don't want to do it.
- zelly 7y agoAre there any cloud products that have hard $$$ caps? Even non-big 3. Any at all? Seems like this is a huge dealbreaker. You cannot be expected to perfectly audit your side project for security. Suppose someone finds a remote code execution and starts mining Monero on it. Or someone just points a botnet at it. You could be on the hook for an unlimited amount of money. Might as well just install Kubernetes on a monthly-fee VPS and pretend you're using GCP.
- GordonS 7y agoYes, Azure lets you set a per-Subscription spending limit. It boggles the mind that AWS and GCP don't offer a payment cap - for that reason alone, I wouldn't go near them for side projects.