5 ms·

All the cruft of a big cloud provider, AND the joy of uncapped yolo billing that has the potential to drain your creditcard overnight. No thanks, I'll personall

All the cruft of a big cloud provider, AND the joy of uncapped yolo billing that has the potential to drain your creditcard overnight. No thanks, I'll personally stick with Modal and vast.ai

kamranjon 1y ago
I dunno, the scale to zero and pay per second features seemed super useful to me after forgetting to shut down some training instances with AWS. Also the fast startup ability, if it actually works as well as they say, would be amazing for a lot of the type of workloads that I have.
- isoprophlex 1y ago
  Agreed, but runpod or modal offer the same. Happy to use big cloud for a client if they pay the bills, but for personal quests... too scary.
rikafurude21 1y ago
thats what billing limits are for
- aiiizzz 1y ago
  Those, on gcp, are just alerts, not hard limits, no?
  - jsheard 1y ago
    Yeah. I think you can hack together a function which pulls the plug automatically if a billing alert fires, but IIRC the alerts can take a few hours to respond, so extreme runaway usage could still result in a bad time.
    - worldsayshi 1y ago
      I would rather not realize i had left a bug in that hack after the fact.
- isoprophlex 1y ago
  Unless something changed gcp only does billing alerts, not billing limits
montebicyclelo 1y ago
Not providing a cap on spending is a major flaw of GCP for individuals / small projects. With Cloud Run, AFAIK, spending can effectively be capped by: limiting concurrency, plus limiting the max number of instances it can scale to. (But this is not as good as GCP having a proper cap.)
- brutus1213 1y ago
  Amazon is the same I think? I live in constant fear we will have a runaway job one day. I get daily emails to myself (as a manager) and to my finance person. We had one instance where a team member forgot to turn off a machine for a few months :( I get why it is a business strategy to not have limits .. but I wonder if providers would get more usage if people had more trusts on costs/predictability.
  - anonymousab 1y ago
    I remember going out to dinner, years ago, with a fairly senior AWS billing engineer. An acquaintance of a coworker. He looked completely surprised when I asked about runaway billing and why there wasn't any simple options to cap a given resource to prevent those cases. His response was that they didn't build that because none of their customers wanted anything like that, as far as he was aware.
    - sidibe 1y ago
      I'm sure lot of people at Amazon and Google are aware small customers want this and it's a feature they'd like to brag about, but it is much harder to implement a real time quota on spend than a daily batched job for the money part + realtime resource scoped quotas.
    - dragandj 1y ago
      Yeah, right. Capping a resource, such a wild idea. Of course they won't implement it for the same reason bar owners don't put a cap on drinks.
      - 1y ago
nprateem 1y ago
Cloud Run is great but no billing limits is too scary. No idea why they don't address this. They must know if they support individuals we'll eventually leave our saases there.
- randlet 1y ago
  Setting max instances effectively caps your spend right?
  - vrosas 1y ago
    Yes. CR has had this feature since day 1, people just don't bother to read the docs and would rather write long blog posts blaming their cloud provider for manufacturing the gun they shot themself in the foot with.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - nprateem 1y ago
      CR is just one service. What if a bug in my app lets users rinse my Gemini API usage, etc.
decimalenough 1y ago
You can set max instances in Cloud Run, which is an effective limit on how much you'll spend. Also, hard dollar caps are rarely if ever the right choice. App Engine used to have these, and the practical effect was that your website would completely stop working exactly when you least want it to (posted on HN etc). It's better to set billing alerts and make the call yourself if they go off.
- rustc 1y ago
  > Also, hard dollar caps are rarely if ever the right choice. Depends on if you're a big business or an individual. There is absolutely no reason I would ever pay $100k for a traffic burst on my personal site or side project (like the $100k Netlify case a few months ago). > It's better to set billing alerts and make the call yourself if they go off. Billing alerts are not instant and neither is anyone online 24x7 monitoring the alerts.
  - brutus1213 1y ago
    100% agreed. This can be solved with technology .. let users set a soft and hard threshold for example. Runaway costs is the problem here.
- ipaddr 1y ago
  One bad actor / misconfiguration / attack can put you out of business. It not the safest strategy to allow unlimited liability in business or for personal projects.
petesergeant 1y ago
I've abandoned DataDog in production for just this reason. Is the amount of money they make on dinging people who screw up really worth the ill-will and people who decide they're just not going to start projects on these platforms?
- geodel 1y ago
  > Is the amount of money they make on dinging people who screw up really worth the ill-will I think it is . 1) They make money for services they provided instead of looking into meaning of what customer actually wanted. 2) Small time customers move away so they concentrate energy on big enterprise sales. Not justifying anything here but it just kind of make business sense for them.
  - petesergeant 1y ago
    Definitely possible. I wonder over what time period you miss out on small customers who become big customers and go on that journey with you; perhaps that would be minimal anyway.
spacecadet 1y ago
Runpod is pretty great. I wrote some genetic end point script that I can deploy in seconds, download the models to the pod, and Im ready to go. Plus I forgot and left a pod running, but down, for a week and it was like 0.60, and they emailed me like 3 times reminding me of the pod.
weinzierl 1y ago
I never used modal or vast.ai and from their pages it was not obvious how they solve the yolo billing issue? Are they pre-paid or do they support caps?
- thundergolfer 1y ago
  Engineer from Modal here: we support caps. They kick in within ~2s if your usage exceeds the configured limit.
- sharifhsn 1y ago
  I know vast.ai uses a prepaid credits system.
  - geodel 1y ago
    Doesn't seem vast. Seems tight-budget.ai to me :-)
oldandboring 1y ago
> uncapped yolo billing This made me laugh out loud, thank you for this!

All the cruft of a big cloud provider, AND the joy of uncapped yolo billing that has the potential to drain your creditcard overnight. No thanks, I'll personally stick with Modal and vast.ai

kamranjon 1y ago

I dunno, the scale to zero and pay per second features seemed super useful to me after forgetting to shut down some training instances with AWS. Also the fast startup ability, if it actually works as well as they say, would be amazing for a lot of the type of workloads that I have.

isoprophlex 1y ago
Agreed, but runpod or modal offer the same. Happy to use big cloud for a client if they pay the bills, but for personal quests... too scary.

rikafurude21 1y ago

thats what billing limits are for

aiiizzz 1y ago
Those, on gcp, are just alerts, not hard limits, no?
- jsheard 1y ago
  Yeah. I think you can hack together a function which pulls the plug automatically if a billing alert fires, but IIRC the alerts can take a few hours to respond, so extreme runaway usage could still result in a bad time.
  - worldsayshi 1y ago
    I would rather not realize i had left a bug in that hack after the fact.
isoprophlex 1y ago
Unless something changed gcp only does billing alerts, not billing limits

montebicyclelo 1y ago

Not providing a cap on spending is a major flaw of GCP for individuals / small projects. With Cloud Run, AFAIK, spending can effectively be capped by: limiting concurrency, plus limiting the max number of instances it can scale to. (But this is not as good as GCP having a proper cap.)

brutus1213 1y ago
Amazon is the same I think? I live in constant fear we will have a runaway job one day. I get daily emails to myself (as a manager) and to my finance person. We had one instance where a team member forgot to turn off a machine for a few months :( I get why it is a business strategy to not have limits .. but I wonder if providers would get more usage if people had more trusts on costs/predictability.
- anonymousab 1y ago
  I remember going out to dinner, years ago, with a fairly senior AWS billing engineer. An acquaintance of a coworker. He looked completely surprised when I asked about runaway billing and why there wasn't any simple options to cap a given resource to prevent those cases. His response was that they didn't build that because none of their customers wanted anything like that, as far as he was aware.
  - sidibe 1y ago
    I'm sure lot of people at Amazon and Google are aware small customers want this and it's a feature they'd like to brag about, but it is much harder to implement a real time quota on spend than a daily batched job for the money part + realtime resource scoped quotas.
  - dragandj 1y ago
    Yeah, right. Capping a resource, such a wild idea. Of course they won't implement it for the same reason bar owners don't put a cap on drinks.
    - 1y ago

nprateem 1y ago

Cloud Run is great but no billing limits is too scary. No idea why they don't address this. They must know if they support individuals we'll eventually leave our saases there.

randlet 1y ago
Setting max instances effectively caps your spend right?
- vrosas 1y ago
  Yes. CR has had this feature since day 1, people just don't bother to read the docs and would rather write long blog posts blaming their cloud provider for manufacturing the gun they shot themself in the foot with.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - nprateem 1y ago
    CR is just one service. What if a bug in my app lets users rinse my Gemini API usage, etc.

decimalenough 1y ago

You can set max instances in Cloud Run, which is an effective limit on how much you'll spend. Also, hard dollar caps are rarely if ever the right choice. App Engine used to have these, and the practical effect was that your website would completely stop working exactly when you least want it to (posted on HN etc). It's better to set billing alerts and make the call yourself if they go off.

rustc 1y ago
> Also, hard dollar caps are rarely if ever the right choice. Depends on if you're a big business or an individual. There is absolutely no reason I would ever pay $100k for a traffic burst on my personal site or side project (like the $100k Netlify case a few months ago). > It's better to set billing alerts and make the call yourself if they go off. Billing alerts are not instant and neither is anyone online 24x7 monitoring the alerts.
- brutus1213 1y ago
  100% agreed. This can be solved with technology .. let users set a soft and hard threshold for example. Runaway costs is the problem here.
ipaddr 1y ago
One bad actor / misconfiguration / attack can put you out of business. It not the safest strategy to allow unlimited liability in business or for personal projects.

petesergeant 1y ago

I've abandoned DataDog in production for just this reason. Is the amount of money they make on dinging people who screw up really worth the ill-will and people who decide they're just not going to start projects on these platforms?

geodel 1y ago
> Is the amount of money they make on dinging people who screw up really worth the ill-will I think it is . 1) They make money for services they provided instead of looking into meaning of what customer actually wanted. 2) Small time customers move away so they concentrate energy on big enterprise sales. Not justifying anything here but it just kind of make business sense for them.
- petesergeant 1y ago
  Definitely possible. I wonder over what time period you miss out on small customers who become big customers and go on that journey with you; perhaps that would be minimal anyway.

spacecadet 1y ago

Runpod is pretty great. I wrote some genetic end point script that I can deploy in seconds, download the models to the pod, and Im ready to go. Plus I forgot and left a pod running, but down, for a week and it was like 0.60, and they emailed me like 3 times reminding me of the pod.

weinzierl 1y ago

I never used modal or vast.ai and from their pages it was not obvious how they solve the yolo billing issue? Are they pre-paid or do they support caps?

thundergolfer 1y ago
Engineer from Modal here: we support caps. They kick in within ~2s if your usage exceeds the configured limit.
sharifhsn 1y ago
I know vast.ai uses a prepaid credits system.
- geodel 1y ago
  Doesn't seem vast. Seems tight-budget.ai to me :-)

oldandboring 1y ago

> uncapped yolo billing This made me laugh out loud, thank you for this!