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I've never been able to understand why so many usage-based hosting platforms don't give you the option to say "if my bill goes above X, shut down the service in

I've never been able to understand why so many usage-based hosting platforms don't give you the option to say "if my bill goes above X, shut down the service instead of continuing to charge me". It seems so easy and obvious, and I'll never ever use a platform for personal projects that doesn't let you have a failsafe

Nathanba 4y ago
it seems they make enough money without us as customers, to me it's weird as well.
personjerry 4y ago
Doesn't AWS offer limits? Smaller companies don't?
- brundolf 4y ago
  I thought I remembered someone saying AWS doesn't, and I've heard stories from people on here about other platforms
  - korean-pixel_13 4y ago
    I think Vultr offered a similar feature that was helpful for me. It's definitely good to see more companies looking at adopting this feature.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  From what I remember, they don't offer limits, and neither does GCP. They offer billing alerts and that's it. Both cloud platforms operate on what they call a "shared responsibility" model, aka you bill it you buy it.
  - rickette 4y ago
    And these alerts aren't realtime. Meaning damage is already done when you receive an alert 24h after the fact.
- detaro 4y ago
  the big clouds usually have something you can wrap around alerting on their usage tracking APIs, but that's often very "eventually consistent" and might be delayed by days. Which is understandable in some cases, is still useful for some cases, but e.g. doesn't reliably protect you from "oh crap a broken config launched way to many VMs and now I've spent 10k in a day"
Rauchg 4y ago
We'll definitely be looking into usage limits after the fix rolls out.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Glad to hear!
swyx 4y ago
there are platforms out there that offer it, but i dont remember their name because its not a feature that leads, its a nice to have.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
thundergolfer 4y ago
It might be really hard to add in retroactively. Otherwise there’s no excuse, it’s such an annoying vulnerability for a customer, even if you can email support and get a refund. Where I work, modal.com, we have enforced budget limits for accounts.
- brundolf 4y ago
  > It might be really hard to add in retroactively I don't see how? if (cap != null && service.currentBill > cap) { service.deactivate() }
  - lozenge 4y ago
    So do you want all your S3 buckets deleted when you reach the cap? How about that pet EC2 with ephemeral storage?
    - brundolf 4y ago
      Sure, it gets more complicated with storage. But I think we're mostly talking about stateless services here And for storage or storage-having services you could easily have a "shut it down but preserve the data for a comparatively-small recurring fixed storage charge"
smt88 4y ago
> I've never been able to understand why so many usage-based hosting platforms don't give you the option to say "if my bill goes above X, shut down the service instead of continuing to charge me". Large, valuable customers wouldn't use this option. It would only help the hobbyist types who aren't doing anything mission-critical and aren't the platform's most profitable (not big spenders, not particularly loyal because they aren't big enough to tailor their infra to that platform, etc.)
- encoderer 4y ago
  With self-serve developer tooling like vercel they are hoping that devs bring the tools to work that they have been prototyping themselves. That’s why there’s a free tier.
- brundolf 4y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. It's probably a lower risk for them, but still, a runaway service can rack up unlimited bills. At some point it matters to everybody. Even if they set it to $CURRENT_CASH_RESERVES, that has non-zero value And when we talk about the in-between - startups - I'm pretty sure I read at least one anecdote on here about being put out of business by surprise hosting bills
- wruza 4y ago
  Large, valuable customers wouldn't use this option Unless they prefer to rely on being large and valuable as a leverage, they just have much bigger limits. And even in such autoscale-type company there may be a separate department that would want to limit their budget because they have one. Imagine spending $100k extra accidentally in your office while the whole budget is around $10M and now you can’t simply reach support on terms of “that billion was clearly a mistake”, because $10.1M seems normal.
Buttons840 4y ago
I was looking at Jarvislabs for renting some GPUs recently. They use a prepay model. Pay up front and things shut down when the credit is used up. https://jarvislabs.ai/docs/accounts-user/add-credits/ https://jarvislabs.ai/docs/accounts-user/add-credits/
emptysea 4y ago
Usually these billing systems are somewhat async so they’re would probably still be overages Better than nothing though
TechBro8615 4y ago
This is why I use virtual credit cards with preconfigured spending limits for each vendor. If this happened to me, and Vercel refused to refund it, I would simply cancel the service and dare them to collect the debt.
- neurostimulant 4y ago
  Too bad more and more services start rejecting them. For example, GCP started rejecting virtual prepaid cards from my banks a while ago.
brianjking 4y ago
Because the customers that may use this feature don't make the company any money. The users that do wouldn't want or need this feature.

Nathanba 4y ago

it seems they make enough money without us as customers, to me it's weird as well.

personjerry 4y ago

Doesn't AWS offer limits? Smaller companies don't?

brundolf 4y ago
I thought I remembered someone saying AWS doesn't, and I've heard stories from people on here about other platforms
- korean-pixel_13 4y ago
  I think Vultr offered a similar feature that was helpful for me. It's definitely good to see more companies looking at adopting this feature.
danielvaughn 4y ago
From what I remember, they don't offer limits, and neither does GCP. They offer billing alerts and that's it. Both cloud platforms operate on what they call a "shared responsibility" model, aka you bill it you buy it.
- rickette 4y ago
  And these alerts aren't realtime. Meaning damage is already done when you receive an alert 24h after the fact.
detaro 4y ago
the big clouds usually have something you can wrap around alerting on their usage tracking APIs, but that's often very "eventually consistent" and might be delayed by days. Which is understandable in some cases, is still useful for some cases, but e.g. doesn't reliably protect you from "oh crap a broken config launched way to many VMs and now I've spent 10k in a day"

Rauchg 4y ago

We'll definitely be looking into usage limits after the fix rolls out.

brundolf 4y ago
Glad to hear!

swyx 4y ago

there are platforms out there that offer it, but i dont remember their name because its not a feature that leads, its a nice to have.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

thundergolfer 4y ago

It might be really hard to add in retroactively. Otherwise there’s no excuse, it’s such an annoying vulnerability for a customer, even if you can email support and get a refund. Where I work, modal.com, we have enforced budget limits for accounts.

brundolf 4y ago
> It might be really hard to add in retroactively I don't see how? if (cap != null && service.currentBill > cap) { service.deactivate() }
- lozenge 4y ago
  So do you want all your S3 buckets deleted when you reach the cap? How about that pet EC2 with ephemeral storage?
  - brundolf 4y ago
    Sure, it gets more complicated with storage. But I think we're mostly talking about stateless services here And for storage or storage-having services you could easily have a "shut it down but preserve the data for a comparatively-small recurring fixed storage charge"

smt88 4y ago

> I've never been able to understand why so many usage-based hosting platforms don't give you the option to say "if my bill goes above X, shut down the service instead of continuing to charge me". Large, valuable customers wouldn't use this option. It would only help the hobbyist types who aren't doing anything mission-critical and aren't the platform's most profitable (not big spenders, not particularly loyal because they aren't big enough to tailor their infra to that platform, etc.)

encoderer 4y ago
With self-serve developer tooling like vercel they are hoping that devs bring the tools to work that they have been prototyping themselves. That’s why there’s a free tier.
brundolf 4y ago
I'm not sure that's true. It's probably a lower risk for them, but still, a runaway service can rack up unlimited bills. At some point it matters to everybody. Even if they set it to $CURRENT_CASH_RESERVES, that has non-zero value And when we talk about the in-between - startups - I'm pretty sure I read at least one anecdote on here about being put out of business by surprise hosting bills
wruza 4y ago
Large, valuable customers wouldn't use this option Unless they prefer to rely on being large and valuable as a leverage, they just have much bigger limits. And even in such autoscale-type company there may be a separate department that would want to limit their budget because they have one. Imagine spending $100k extra accidentally in your office while the whole budget is around $10M and now you can’t simply reach support on terms of “that billion was clearly a mistake”, because $10.1M seems normal.

Buttons840 4y ago

I was looking at Jarvislabs for renting some GPUs recently. They use a prepay model. Pay up front and things shut down when the credit is used up. https://jarvislabs.ai/docs/accounts-user/add-credits/ https://jarvislabs.ai/docs/accounts-user/add-credits/

emptysea 4y ago

Usually these billing systems are somewhat async so they’re would probably still be overages Better than nothing though

TechBro8615 4y ago

This is why I use virtual credit cards with preconfigured spending limits for each vendor. If this happened to me, and Vercel refused to refund it, I would simply cancel the service and dare them to collect the debt.

neurostimulant 4y ago
Too bad more and more services start rejecting them. For example, GCP started rejecting virtual prepaid cards from my banks a while ago.

brianjking 4y ago

Because the customers that may use this feature don't make the company any money. The users that do wouldn't want or need this feature.