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This is an insane take, there are many options here. The idea that the reason to structure billing this way is anything OTHER than that it's the most profitable

This is an insane take, there are many options here. The idea that the reason to structure billing this way is anything OTHER than that it's the most profitable way to do things is ludicrous. It doesn't matter if you can construct some other plausible reason, as long as it's the most profitable way to operate why would I believe the cause to be something other than profit maximization.

danpalmer 2y ago
What alternative do you suggest? I'm not saying providers should delete data when hitting a cap, but rather that this is one example of why you can't cap spend. It is possible to combine all the billing axes for things like this so that, but when you do you get Dropbox, or Google Drive. The explicit value proposition of cloud hosting is paying for what you use, and generally granular services are lower margin and more commoditised than higher level services.
- thot_experiment 2y ago
  You could just throw an error, freeze services and do whatever "let someone handle this on a case by case basis". It's absurd to suggest that the customer doesn't want to have the option to prevent their spend from growing by multiple orders of magnitude without a human in the loop. Sure maybe deletes are a billable action (also absurd and fake), but having the options to say "hey I can't spend more than X, cut my service if my spend + cleanup would cost more than X" is absolutely doable and something many people would want.
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    If you think that deleting all data (blob storage, block storage, VM states, caches, etc) is preferable to a surprise bill, then I don't think there's anything we can debate here.
    - thot_experiment 2y ago
      I agree that there isn't anything we can debate here, but it's because you're making straw men. There's a middle ground here between getting charged 4 orders of magnitude more than you expected and having all of your data deleted that you're obtusely refusing to consider.

danpalmer 2y ago

What alternative do you suggest? I'm not saying providers should delete data when hitting a cap, but rather that this is one example of why you can't cap spend. It is possible to combine all the billing axes for things like this so that, but when you do you get Dropbox, or Google Drive. The explicit value proposition of cloud hosting is paying for what you use, and generally granular services are lower margin and more commoditised than higher level services.

thot_experiment 2y ago
You could just throw an error, freeze services and do whatever "let someone handle this on a case by case basis". It's absurd to suggest that the customer doesn't want to have the option to prevent their spend from growing by multiple orders of magnitude without a human in the loop. Sure maybe deletes are a billable action (also absurd and fake), but having the options to say "hey I can't spend more than X, cut my service if my spend + cleanup would cost more than X" is absolutely doable and something many people would want.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  If you think that deleting all data (blob storage, block storage, VM states, caches, etc) is preferable to a surprise bill, then I don't think there's anything we can debate here.
  - thot_experiment 2y ago
    I agree that there isn't anything we can debate here, but it's because you're making straw men. There's a middle ground here between getting charged 4 orders of magnitude more than you expected and having all of your data deleted that you're obtusely refusing to consider.