Loss aversion[1] describes the phenomenon pretty well: > Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on losses and gains:

Loss aversion[1] describes the phenomenon pretty well: > Humans may be hardwired to be loss averse due to asymmetric evolutionary pressure on losses and gains: for an organism operating close to the edge of survival, the loss of a day's food could cause death, whereas the gain of an extra day's food would not cause an extra day of life (unless the food could be easily and effectively stored). For lots of companies an accidental over-use of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars is an annoyance, but for a single person that could bankrupt them. I generally avoid programmatically interacting with cloud providers on my own time for exactly this reason. One mistake in a loop can get expensive fast. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion