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To put these billing errors in context, our account suddenly showed ~$12,000,000 in usage fees. I saw some others posting bills high as 100s of millions. Pretty
by yed 4y ago
To put these billing errors in context, our account suddenly showed ~$12,000,000 in usage fees. I saw some others posting bills high as 100s of millions. Pretty heart attack inducing.
- karussell 4y agoyeah, better than coffee ;) ... we had $78,610,108
- krab 4y agoThe amount was so ridiculous that it didn't replace coffee for me. :-) Anyway, it's already fixed for our account.
- fishnchips 4y agoOur account is still showing $188,536,934.07 overage.
- xrd 4y agoYou didn't read the blog post from GitHub saying they were switching to Zimbabwean dollars because the dollar is falling out of favor as the reserve currency?
- dx034 4y agoThat these were so scary shows the downside of usage-based fees. If you run on dedicated hardware, you always know what you'll have to pay, no matter how you utilize the system. The risk of surprise bills, even with the advantage of higher scalability, is one of the major factors to put me off many cloud services. I wouldn't want to run a business where you always have the risk of some bug or unforeseen behavior destroying your budget.
- bencollier49 4y agoI've said this over and over again. There should be laws in place enabling a person or company to set a hard limit on spend. It would be a pro-innovation law because people would then have the confidence to innovate.
- Dave3of5 4y agoI agree cloud providers shouldn't be able to bankrupt their users due to high usage. IMO it should be mandatory to set a limit it makes sense from a finance side. In my case my cards don't have $12 million of a limit so they could not actually charge me that amount of money. It makes sense if you use invoice type billing i.e. like a company but as an individual these insane bills can't actually run.
- blibble 4y agothey wouldn't be able to charge your CC but this isn't really relevant to what you owe them they can still attempt to come after you for that $12 million
- Dave3of5 4y agoOf course but I cannot ever pay that amount so what would be the point from their side. It would be more sensible to stop after they run out of money on my CC.
- OJFord 4y agoI also think it'd be good for companies. If you usually pay (say, numbers don't matter, except that AWS or whoever doesn't care until they get bigger I suppose) 1k-3k and set a 'don't surprise me too much' limit of 5k, then when something unexpected happens, instead of having a bad time pleading with them to let you off 12k or whatever and feeling cautious about using it again perhaps with some sour taste even if they do let you off, you think 'woah, glad I have the limit', and pretty much get on with your day; AWS or whoever gets an unexpected 2-4k instead of writing off 9-11k, and keeps the happy customer (at the customer's expense instead of its own).
- bencollier49 4y agoI agree, unless... It could be that they're making most of their money from spikes. It would be interesting if that were the case.
- sascha_sl 4y agoThese emails we got were about billing limit (which is meant to be a hard limit on github) being hit too. Either the bug ignored such limits (ours was in the low thousands) or it created charges so fast that the limit couldn't apply anymore.
- jotm 4y agoDamn. Well, when you owe $10,000 it's your problem, when you owe $10,000,000 it's their problem :D
- prepend 4y agoI think this code wasn’t supposed to go into effect until Microsoft moves beyond their friendly stage and moves into maximum revenue extract stage.