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From the article: > consumers hate metered billing. they'd rather overpay for unlimited than get surprised by a bill. Yes and no. Take Amazon. You think your

From the article: > consumers hate metered billing. they'd rather overpay for unlimited than get surprised by a bill. Yes and no. Take Amazon. You think your costs are known and WHAMMO surprise bill. Why do you get a surprise bill? Because you cannot say 'Turn shit off at X money per month'. Can't do it. Not an option. All of these 'Surprise Net 30' offerings are the same. You think you're getting a stable price until GOTAHCA. Now, metered billing can actually be good, when the user knows exactly where they stand on the metering AND can set maximums so their budget doesn't go over. Taken realistically, as an AI company, you provide a 'used tokens/total tokens' bar graph, tokens per response, and estimated amount of responses before exceeding. Again, don't surprise the user. But that's an anathema to companies who want to hide tokens to dollars, the same way gambling companies obfuscate 'corporate bux' to USD.

ikari_pl 1y ago
I often find Amazon pricing to be vague and cryptic, sometimes there's literally no way to tell ehy, for example, your database cost is fluctuating all the time
- joseda-hg 1y ago
  Amazon pricing is nice if you compare it to Azure...
- crinkly 1y ago
  Yeah that. We moved to AWS using their best practices and enterprise cost estimation stuff and got a 6x cost increment on something that was supposed to be cheaper and now we’re fucked because we can’t get out. It’s nearly impossible to tell what the hell is going where and we are mostly surviving on enterprise discounts from negotiations. The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not my department or funeral fortunately. Our AWS account is about $15 a month.
  - bufferoverflow 1y ago
    [dead]
  - ajb 1y ago
    Are you using separate accounts per use case? That's the only real way to get a cost breakdown, otherwise you have no idea what piece of infrastructure is for what. They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly.
    - crinkly 1y ago
      Yeah we have many accounts. Hence why I know ours cheap. Difficult to break it down within the account as you say without tag maintenance.
    - bumblehean 1y ago
      > They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly. The way to deal with this is with an org-level Service Control Policy that enforces the tagging standards. A resource doesn't have the right tags associated with it? It can't be created. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_policies_scps_examples_tagging.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...
  - AtheistOfFail 1y ago
    > The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not a bug, a feature.
- graemep 1y ago
  If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you. I am not saying this is desirable, but it is necessary IFF you chose to use these services. They are complex by design, and intended primarily for large scale users who do have the expertise to handle the complexity.
  - ajsnigrutin 1y ago
    But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists. Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
    - mort96 1y ago
      I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons -specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider. You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
      - graemep 1y ago
        > You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
        mort96 1y ago
- UltraSane 1y ago
  AWS pricing is actually extremely clearly specified but it is hard to predict your costs unless you have a good understanding of your expected usage.
  - IX-103 1y ago
    They have clear numbers for things, but it's not obvious how those numbers would map to what you're trying to run. If I charged compute based on the number of micro-ops executed then that would be a clear definition, but the actual cost would not be something you could predict, as it would depend on what architecture of CPU you ended up running it on. AWS is even more complicated and variable than that as for cloud storage you have to deal with not only the costs of the different storage classes, but also early deletion fees, access charges, etc. Combined it makes it impractical to work out how much deleting a file from cloud storage will save (or cost). Sure you could probably calculate it if you knew the entire billing history of the file and the bucket it is in, but do you really want to do that every time you delete a file? While I don't know enough to say if this is intentional, as it could result from simply blindly optimizing for profit, this sort of pricing model is anti-capitalistic as it prevents consumers from truly making informed decisions. We see the same thing is the US healthcare system, where no one can actually tell you how much an operation will cost ahead of time. That creates a very inefficient (but very profitable) market.
scoreandmore 1y ago
You can set billing alerts and write a lambda function to respond and disable resources. Of course they don’t make it easy but if you don’t learn how to use limits what do you expect? This argument amazes me. Cloud services require some degree of responsibility on the users side.
- esafak 1y ago
  So you're okay with turning your site off...
  - mystraline 1y ago
    This a logical fallacy of false dilemma. I made it clear that you ask the user to choose between 'accept risk of overrun and keep running stuff', 'shut down all stuff on exceeding $ number', or even a 'shut down these services on exceeding number', or other possible ways to limit and control costs. The cloud companies do not want to permit this because they would lose money over surprise billing.
  - verbify 1y ago
    Isn't that the definition of metered billing?
  - dd36 1y ago
    Cats doing tricks has a limited budget.
  - anothernewdude 1y ago
    YES!
- gray_-_wolf 1y ago
  Last time I was looking into this, is there not up to an hour of delay for the billing alerts? It did not seem possible to ensure you do not run over your budget.
- mystraline 1y ago
  This is complete utter hogwash. Up until recently, you could hit somebody else's S3 endpoint, no auth, and get 403's that would charge them 10s of thousands of dollars. Coudnt even firewall it. And no way to see, or anything. Number go up every 15-30 minutes in cost dashboard. Real responsibility is 'I have 100$ a month for cloud compute'. Give me a easy way to view it, and shut down if I exceed that. That's real responsibility, that Scamazon, Azure, Google - none of them 'permit'. They (and well, you) instead say "you can build some shitty clone of the functionality we should have provided, but we would make less money". Oh, and your lambda job? That too costs money. It should not cost more money to detect and stop stuff on 'too much cost' report. This should be a default feature of cloud: uncapped costs, or stop services
mhitza 1y ago
> Again, don't surprise the user. But that's an anathema to companies who want to hide tokens to dollars, the same way gambling companies obfuscate 'corporate bux' to USD. This is the exact same thing that frustrates me with GitHub's AI rollout. Been trialing the new Copilot agent, and it's cost is fully opaque. Multiple references to "premium requests" that don't show up real-time in my dashboard, not clear how many I have in total/left, and when these premium requests are referenced in the UI they link to the documentation that also doesn't talk about limits (instead of linking to the associated billing dashboard).
- llbbdd 1y ago
  Highly recommend getting the $20/month OpenAI sub and letting copilot use that. Quality-wise I feel like I'm getting the same results but OAIs limits are a little more sane.
  - debian3 1y ago
    How do you link the openai sub to Gh copilot? I thought you needed to use OpenAI api
  - mhitza 1y ago
    I'm talking about this new agent mode https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-meet-the-new-coding-agent/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo... for which as far as I'm aware there's no option to switch the underlying model used.
- saratogacx 1y ago
  They don't make it easy to figure out but after researching it for my Co. this is what I came to. * One chat message -> one premium credit (most at 1 credit but some are less and some, like opus, are 10x) * Edit mode is the same as Ask/chat * One agent session (meaning you start a new agent chat) is one "request" so you can have multiple messages and they cost the credit cost of one chat message. Microsoft's Copilot offerings are essentially a masterclass in cost opaqueness. Nothing in any offering is spelled out and they always seem to be just short of the expectation they are selling.
siva7 1y ago
it's surprising that YC has a gazillion companies doing some ai infrastructure observability product yet i have to see a product that really presents me and the user easily token usage and pricing estimations which for me is the #1 criteria to use that. make billing and pricing for me and the user easier. instead they run their heads into evals and niche features.
chrisweekly 1y ago
GOTAHCA?
- arcanemachiner 1y ago
  Maybe GOTCHA?
Spooky23 1y ago
Metering is great for defined processes. I love AWS because I can align cost with business. In the old days it was often hard and an internal political process. Some saleschick would shake the assets at a director and now I’m eating the cost for some network gear i don’t need. But for users, that fine grained cost is not good, because you’re forcing a user to be accountable with metrics that aren’t tied to their productivity. When I was an intern in the 90s, I was at a company that required approval to make long distance phone calls. Some bureaucrat would assess whether my 20 minute phone call was justified and could charge me if my monthly expense was over some limit. Not fun. Flat rate is the way to go for user ai, until you understand the value in the business and the providers start looking for margin. If I make a $40/hr analyst 20% more productive, that’s worth $16k of value - the $200/mo ChatGPT Pro is a steal.
ajb 1y ago
Amazon is worse than this, though the AWS bait and switch is that you are supposed to save over the alternatives. So it should be worth switching if you would save more than the dev time you would invest in doing so right? But your company isn't going to do that. Because of opportunity cost. Your company expects to get some multiple of a the cost of dev time back, that they invest in their own business. And because of various uncertainties - in return, in the time taken to develop, in competition, etc - they will only invest dev time when that multiple is not small. I'm not a business manager, but I'd guess a factor of 5. But that means that if you were conned into using infrastructure that actually costs more than the alternative, making your cost structure worse, you're still going to eat the loss because it's not worth taking your devs time to switch back. But tokens don't quite have this problem -yet. Most of us can still do development the old way, and it's not a project to turn it off. Expect this to change though.
pembrook 1y ago
Metered billing makes sense for B2B infrastructure-as-a-service type products (AWS), where as your company grows both you and the infra provider know the bill will grow manageably over time. Infra is set it and forget it. But for AI in the context of point-solutions and on-the-job use cases, metered billing is a death blow. In this context, metered is a massive incentive to not use the product and requires the huge friction of having to do a cost/benefit analysis before every task. And if you're using it at work you may even need management sign-off before you can use it again. For a tool that's intended to amplify productivity, very few humans want to make a cost/benefit analysis 250 times a day whether it's worth $3 to code up a boilerplate or not. On metered billing, they just wont use it.
- inetknght 1y ago
  > and requires the huge friction of having to do a cost/benefit analysis before every task That's what we're supposed to do, right? So let's see if we can spend a few tokens to ask the LLM for a cost/benefit analysis of using an LLM to solve the problem. I'd bet we can trust the result...
- redhale 1y ago
  100,% this. PAYG bill anxiety is such a barrier that I will not use it AT ALL if I'm paying the bill. And even when my company is paying, I feel a need to be too careful as to negate much of the benefit. Raise the prices of the all-inclusive plans if need be. But don't make me use (or NOT use) the API for my day-to-day.
- armchairhacker 1y ago
  People don't have issues paying for metered electricity, heat, and water. AFAIK most people are aware of when they're wasting power/heat/water but don't go to extremes, e.g. don't run the shower constantly but don't shower with a bucket.
  - latentsea 1y ago
    LLMs are not essential for survival.
sublinear 1y ago
IT IS GAMBLING
- Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
  Caps lock are mostly unwarranted on hackernews but I am not the PC principal. Like, lets have a real talk, shall we? Lets just assume that the topic we are discussing on that I am right and you are wrong, How can I even convince ya when you are showing so less of maturity... And lets say that you are right and I am wrong, but the fact that you are being so bullish on the fact that you can't be wrong and bringing the "this is worse than reddit" and etc. can't make me take you serious and can't make me think your opinion is valid. If you really want, I'd like to logically disect this stuff as adults using pure logic & not mere opinions. Waiting for your response.
selcuka 1y ago
> consumers hate metered billing. they'd rather overpay for unlimited than get surprised by a bill. Standard packages are like insurance. Everyone pays more or less the same premium, but some claim more than others. On average people always overpay for insurance. The upside is that it's a predictable cost for the users, and also means predictable cash flow for the provider.
nijave 1y ago
>Why do you get a surprise bill? You get a surprise bill because of surprise usage of services billed based on usage. If you ask anyone how much water or electricity they use per month, the first thing they're going to do is look at last month's usage. Estimating what you need ahead of time is a hard problem. In fairness, AWS doesn't give you a lot of tools to help you measure and predict how many "units" you'll use outside of running your thing and measuring. On the other hand, running your thing and measuring is the defacto way to figure out how much of something you'll use. Finally, there are AWS services like EC2 and RDS you can run at a fixed cost to help you stay within budget. Traffic/bandwidth is the only thing that comes to mind that you're pretty much required to use without a way to fix the cost (although you can get pretty close with bandwidth limits on EC2 interfaces)
bcrl 1y ago
That's like the introductory prices of the incumbent giant telecom here in Canada: he's $60/month for gigabit internet + phone + TV for 1 year + a $250 prepaid Visa gift card! Oh, you didn't want the bill for $300 on month 13?

ikari_pl 1y ago

I often find Amazon pricing to be vague and cryptic, sometimes there's literally no way to tell ehy, for example, your database cost is fluctuating all the time

joseda-hg 1y ago
Amazon pricing is nice if you compare it to Azure...
crinkly 1y ago
Yeah that. We moved to AWS using their best practices and enterprise cost estimation stuff and got a 6x cost increment on something that was supposed to be cheaper and now we’re fucked because we can’t get out. It’s nearly impossible to tell what the hell is going where and we are mostly surviving on enterprise discounts from negotiations. The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not my department or funeral fortunately. Our AWS account is about $15 a month.
- bufferoverflow 1y ago
  [dead]
- ajb 1y ago
  Are you using separate accounts per use case? That's the only real way to get a cost breakdown, otherwise you have no idea what piece of infrastructure is for what. They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly.
  - crinkly 1y ago
    Yeah we have many accounts. Hence why I know ours cheap. Difficult to break it down within the account as you say without tag maintenance.
  - bumblehean 1y ago
    > They provide a tagging system but it's only informative if someone spends several hours a month tracking down the stuff that didn't get tagged properly. The way to deal with this is with an org-level Service Control Policy that enforces the tagging standards. A resource doesn't have the right tags associated with it? It can't be created. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/orgs_manage_policies_scps_examples_tagging.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/organizations/latest/userguide/o...
- AtheistOfFail 1y ago
  > The worst thing is they worked out you can blend costs in using AWS marketplace without having to raise due diligence on a new vendor or PO. So up it goes even more. Not a bug, a feature.
graemep 1y ago
If your AWS costs are too complex for you to understand you need to employ a finops person or AWS specialist to handle it for you. I am not saying this is desirable, but it is necessary IFF you chose to use these services. They are complex by design, and intended primarily for large scale users who do have the expertise to handle the complexity.
- ajsnigrutin 1y ago
  But they're also simple and cheap if you're a "one man band" trying out some personal idea that might or might not take off. Those people have no budgets for specialists. Pricing schemes like these just make them move back to virtual machines with "unlimited" shared cpu usage and setting up services (db,...) manually.
  - mort96 1y ago
    I'm 100% on team "just rent VMs and run the software on there". It's not that hard, it has predictable price and performance, and you don't lock yourself into one provider. If you build your whole service on top of some weird Amazons -specific thing, and Amazon jacks up their prices, you don't have any recourse. With VMs, you can just spin up new VMs with another provider. You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Spinning up a few Hetzner VMs is easy. Finding European alternatives to all the different "serverless" services Amazon offers is hard.
    - graemep 1y ago
      > You could also have potential customers who would be interested in your solution, but don't want it hosted by an American company. Not happened yet. The nearest I have come to it was a requirement that certain medical information stays in the UK, and that is satisfied by using AWS (or other American suppliers) as long as its hosted in the UK.
      - mort96 1y ago
UltraSane 1y ago
AWS pricing is actually extremely clearly specified but it is hard to predict your costs unless you have a good understanding of your expected usage.
- IX-103 1y ago
  They have clear numbers for things, but it's not obvious how those numbers would map to what you're trying to run. If I charged compute based on the number of micro-ops executed then that would be a clear definition, but the actual cost would not be something you could predict, as it would depend on what architecture of CPU you ended up running it on. AWS is even more complicated and variable than that as for cloud storage you have to deal with not only the costs of the different storage classes, but also early deletion fees, access charges, etc. Combined it makes it impractical to work out how much deleting a file from cloud storage will save (or cost). Sure you could probably calculate it if you knew the entire billing history of the file and the bucket it is in, but do you really want to do that every time you delete a file? While I don't know enough to say if this is intentional, as it could result from simply blindly optimizing for profit, this sort of pricing model is anti-capitalistic as it prevents consumers from truly making informed decisions. We see the same thing is the US healthcare system, where no one can actually tell you how much an operation will cost ahead of time. That creates a very inefficient (but very profitable) market.

scoreandmore 1y ago

You can set billing alerts and write a lambda function to respond and disable resources. Of course they don’t make it easy but if you don’t learn how to use limits what do you expect? This argument amazes me. Cloud services require some degree of responsibility on the users side.

esafak 1y ago
So you're okay with turning your site off...
- mystraline 1y ago
  This a logical fallacy of false dilemma. I made it clear that you ask the user to choose between 'accept risk of overrun and keep running stuff', 'shut down all stuff on exceeding $ number', or even a 'shut down these services on exceeding number', or other possible ways to limit and control costs. The cloud companies do not want to permit this because they would lose money over surprise billing.
- verbify 1y ago
  Isn't that the definition of metered billing?
- dd36 1y ago
  Cats doing tricks has a limited budget.
- anothernewdude 1y ago
  YES!
gray_-_wolf 1y ago
Last time I was looking into this, is there not up to an hour of delay for the billing alerts? It did not seem possible to ensure you do not run over your budget.
mystraline 1y ago
This is complete utter hogwash. Up until recently, you could hit somebody else's S3 endpoint, no auth, and get 403's that would charge them 10s of thousands of dollars. Coudnt even firewall it. And no way to see, or anything. Number go up every 15-30 minutes in cost dashboard. Real responsibility is 'I have 100$ a month for cloud compute'. Give me a easy way to view it, and shut down if I exceed that. That's real responsibility, that Scamazon, Azure, Google - none of them 'permit'. They (and well, you) instead say "you can build some shitty clone of the functionality we should have provided, but we would make less money". Oh, and your lambda job? That too costs money. It should not cost more money to detect and stop stuff on 'too much cost' report. This should be a default feature of cloud: uncapped costs, or stop services

mhitza 1y ago

> Again, don't surprise the user. But that's an anathema to companies who want to hide tokens to dollars, the same way gambling companies obfuscate 'corporate bux' to USD. This is the exact same thing that frustrates me with GitHub's AI rollout. Been trialing the new Copilot agent, and it's cost is fully opaque. Multiple references to "premium requests" that don't show up real-time in my dashboard, not clear how many I have in total/left, and when these premium requests are referenced in the UI they link to the documentation that also doesn't talk about limits (instead of linking to the associated billing dashboard).

llbbdd 1y ago
Highly recommend getting the $20/month OpenAI sub and letting copilot use that. Quality-wise I feel like I'm getting the same results but OAIs limits are a little more sane.
- debian3 1y ago
  How do you link the openai sub to Gh copilot? I thought you needed to use OpenAI api
- mhitza 1y ago
  I'm talking about this new agent mode https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilot-meet-the-new-coding-agent/ https://github.blog/news-insights/product-news/github-copilo... for which as far as I'm aware there's no option to switch the underlying model used.
saratogacx 1y ago
They don't make it easy to figure out but after researching it for my Co. this is what I came to. * One chat message -> one premium credit (most at 1 credit but some are less and some, like opus, are 10x) * Edit mode is the same as Ask/chat * One agent session (meaning you start a new agent chat) is one "request" so you can have multiple messages and they cost the credit cost of one chat message. Microsoft's Copilot offerings are essentially a masterclass in cost opaqueness. Nothing in any offering is spelled out and they always seem to be just short of the expectation they are selling.

siva7 1y ago

it's surprising that YC has a gazillion companies doing some ai infrastructure observability product yet i have to see a product that really presents me and the user easily token usage and pricing estimations which for me is the #1 criteria to use that. make billing and pricing for me and the user easier. instead they run their heads into evals and niche features.

chrisweekly 1y ago

GOTAHCA?

arcanemachiner 1y ago
Maybe GOTCHA?

Spooky23 1y ago

Metering is great for defined processes. I love AWS because I can align cost with business. In the old days it was often hard and an internal political process. Some saleschick would shake the assets at a director and now I’m eating the cost for some network gear i don’t need. But for users, that fine grained cost is not good, because you’re forcing a user to be accountable with metrics that aren’t tied to their productivity. When I was an intern in the 90s, I was at a company that required approval to make long distance phone calls. Some bureaucrat would assess whether my 20 minute phone call was justified and could charge me if my monthly expense was over some limit. Not fun. Flat rate is the way to go for user ai, until you understand the value in the business and the providers start looking for margin. If I make a $40/hr analyst 20% more productive, that’s worth $16k of value - the $200/mo ChatGPT Pro is a steal.

ajb 1y ago

Amazon is worse than this, though the AWS bait and switch is that you are supposed to save over the alternatives. So it should be worth switching if you would save more than the dev time you would invest in doing so right? But your company isn't going to do that. Because of opportunity cost. Your company expects to get some multiple of a the cost of dev time back, that they invest in their own business. And because of various uncertainties - in return, in the time taken to develop, in competition, etc - they will only invest dev time when that multiple is not small. I'm not a business manager, but I'd guess a factor of 5. But that means that if you were conned into using infrastructure that actually costs more than the alternative, making your cost structure worse, you're still going to eat the loss because it's not worth taking your devs time to switch back. But tokens don't quite have this problem -yet. Most of us can still do development the old way, and it's not a project to turn it off. Expect this to change though.

pembrook 1y ago

Metered billing makes sense for B2B infrastructure-as-a-service type products (AWS), where as your company grows both you and the infra provider know the bill will grow manageably over time. Infra is set it and forget it. But for AI in the context of point-solutions and on-the-job use cases, metered billing is a death blow. In this context, metered is a massive incentive to not use the product and requires the huge friction of having to do a cost/benefit analysis before every task. And if you're using it at work you may even need management sign-off before you can use it again. For a tool that's intended to amplify productivity, very few humans want to make a cost/benefit analysis 250 times a day whether it's worth $3 to code up a boilerplate or not. On metered billing, they just wont use it.

inetknght 1y ago
> and requires the huge friction of having to do a cost/benefit analysis before every task That's what we're supposed to do, right? So let's see if we can spend a few tokens to ask the LLM for a cost/benefit analysis of using an LLM to solve the problem. I'd bet we can trust the result...
redhale 1y ago
100,% this. PAYG bill anxiety is such a barrier that I will not use it AT ALL if I'm paying the bill. And even when my company is paying, I feel a need to be too careful as to negate much of the benefit. Raise the prices of the all-inclusive plans if need be. But don't make me use (or NOT use) the API for my day-to-day.
armchairhacker 1y ago
People don't have issues paying for metered electricity, heat, and water. AFAIK most people are aware of when they're wasting power/heat/water but don't go to extremes, e.g. don't run the shower constantly but don't shower with a bucket.
- latentsea 1y ago
  LLMs are not essential for survival.

sublinear 1y ago

IT IS GAMBLING

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
Caps lock are mostly unwarranted on hackernews but I am not the PC principal. Like, lets have a real talk, shall we? Lets just assume that the topic we are discussing on that I am right and you are wrong, How can I even convince ya when you are showing so less of maturity... And lets say that you are right and I am wrong, but the fact that you are being so bullish on the fact that you can't be wrong and bringing the "this is worse than reddit" and etc. can't make me take you serious and can't make me think your opinion is valid. If you really want, I'd like to logically disect this stuff as adults using pure logic & not mere opinions. Waiting for your response.

selcuka 1y ago

> consumers hate metered billing. they'd rather overpay for unlimited than get surprised by a bill. Standard packages are like insurance. Everyone pays more or less the same premium, but some claim more than others. On average people always overpay for insurance. The upside is that it's a predictable cost for the users, and also means predictable cash flow for the provider.

nijave 1y ago

>Why do you get a surprise bill? You get a surprise bill because of surprise usage of services billed based on usage. If you ask anyone how much water or electricity they use per month, the first thing they're going to do is look at last month's usage. Estimating what you need ahead of time is a hard problem. In fairness, AWS doesn't give you a lot of tools to help you measure and predict how many "units" you'll use outside of running your thing and measuring. On the other hand, running your thing and measuring is the defacto way to figure out how much of something you'll use. Finally, there are AWS services like EC2 and RDS you can run at a fixed cost to help you stay within budget. Traffic/bandwidth is the only thing that comes to mind that you're pretty much required to use without a way to fix the cost (although you can get pretty close with bandwidth limits on EC2 interfaces)

bcrl 1y ago

That's like the introductory prices of the incumbent giant telecom here in Canada: he's $60/month for gigabit internet + phone + TV for 1 year + a $250 prepaid Visa gift card! Oh, you didn't want the bill for $300 on month 13?