3 ms·

The big difference in case of gas or electric (or even telephone) is that you and only you are in control. Someone would have to physically break into your hous

The big difference in case of gas or electric (or even telephone) is that you and only you are in control. Someone would have to physically break into your house or steal your phone to rack up a huge bill. In contrast, with the cloud the bill is directly proportional to the amount of inbound requests from the Internet, with no out of the box way to implement a limit (I guess you could install Apache/Nginx and enforce a limit there, but doesn't that kinda defeat the whole point of the cloud?).

bstpierre 5y ago
Some cell plans have a charge for incoming texts, roughly like the cloud bill you’re talking about. And (as sibling comment points out) if you’ve got critical household infrastructure that needs gas/electric, you’re not always in control. An unexpected hard freeze could provide you with a big bill next month and you can’t fully control it. I agree with you that there’s definitely a difference of scale and asymmetry but the concept of unpredictable postpaid bills is not a new thing.