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These aren’t limits though, they are just budget notifications. What would be helpful, would be if when you set up your account there was a default limit – as

These aren’t limits though, they are just budget notifications. What would be helpful, would be if when you set up your account there was a default limit – as in an actual limit, where all projects stop working once you go over it - of some sane amount like $5 or $50 or even $500. I have a handful of toy projects on AWS and Google cloud. On both I have budgets set up at $1 and $10, with notifications at 10% 50% and 90%. It’s great, but it’s not a limit. I can still get screwed if somehow, my projects become targets, and I don’t see the emails immediately or aren’t able to act on them immediately. It blows my mind there’s no way I can just say, “there’s no conceivable outcome where I would want to spend more than $10 or more than $100 or whatever so please just cut me off as soon as I get anywhere close to that.” The only conclusion I can come to is that these services are simply not made for small experimental projects, yet I also don’t know any other way to learn the services except by setting up toy projects, and thus exposing yourself to ruinous liability.

sbarre 1y ago
I feel that the likely answer here is that instrumenting real-time spending limit monitoring and cut-off at GCP/AWS scale is Complicated/Expensive to do, so they choose to not do it. I suppose you could bake the limits into each service at deploy time, but that's still a lot of code to write to provide a good experience to a customer who is trying to not pay you money. Not saying this is a good thing, but this feels about right to me.
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  I agree that that’s the likely explanation. It just feels infuriating that the services are sold as easy to get started and risk free with generous free tiers, inviting people and companies to try out small projects, yet each small experiment contains an element of unlimited risk with no mitigation tools.
- Xelbair 1y ago
  I don't care if it is expensive for them. I'm not running their business, I'm their customer - it is inconvenient for me. And frankly any pay-as-you-go scheme should be regulated to have maximum spending limit setting. Not only in IT.
  - VectorLock 1y ago
    Its not expensive for them, its expensive for their customers. If you went over your spending limit and they deleted all your shit, people would be absolutely apoplectic. Instead they make you file a relatively painless ticket and explain why you accidentally went over what you wanted to spend. This is an engineering trade-off they made to make things less painful for their customers.
    - wpm 1y ago
      Why would I apoplectic at Amazon if I set “turn my shit off after it has accrued $10 in charges” to TRUE and they actually followed what I asked them to do?
      - vntok 1y ago
        Is it a serious question? Because then I could have you shutdown just by posting a call to ddos with a link to your search form on an anime image board.
        ipaddr 1y ago
        You can freeze the account vs you can give someone a hundred thousand dollar bill? If you did this to a vps the instance might be unavailable until the traffic slows down but up after. Trust me you would rather they freeze your account.
        wpm 1y ago
        OK? Good! That's what I want to happen! I want that. I do not care if some weirdos on an anime image board can't access some image. I don't want my credit card maxed out. Is that not a serious request? I play around in the same big-boy cloud as some SaaS company, but I'm on the free tier and I explicitly do not want it to scale up forever, and I explicitly do not want to destroy my credit or even think about having to call Amazon over a $100,000 bill because I set my shit up wrong or whatever. I want it to shut off my EC2 instance once it has used up whatever amount of resources is equal to $X. Obviously any world with this feature would also feature customizable restrictions, options, decision trees, etc etc. I don't think anyone is or was suggesting that someone's SaaS app just gets turned off without their permission.
- heyitsguay 1y ago
  Pass a law requiring cloud compute providers to accept a maximum user budget and be unable to charge more than that, and see how quickly the big cloud providers figure it out.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    So tell me again who we need a law? Can you cite one instance where any of the cloud providers refused to give a refund to someone?
    - ipaddr 1y ago
      The person who signs up for the free tier and is charged. https://medium.com/%40akshay.kannan.email/amazon-is-refusing-to-refund-more-than-2-343-in-fraudulent-charges-on-my-aws-account-3289ad01ead3 https://medium.com/%40akshay.kannan.email/amazon-is-refusing...
      - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
        There is no such thing as “signing up for a free tier” at least there wasn’t before July of this year. Some services have free tiers for a certain amount of time and others have an unlimited free tier that resets every month.
- jay_kyburz 1y ago
  Google App Engine had this when it first started.
bee_rider 1y ago
I’ve accidentally hit myself with a bigger than expected AWS bill (just $500 but as a student I didn’t really want to spend that much). So I get being annoyed with the pricing model. But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works. For example, I had some of their machine image thingies (AMI) on my account. They charged me less than a dollar a month, totally reasonable. The only reasonable interpretation of “emergency stop on all charges completely” would be to delete those images (as well as shutting down my $500 nodes). This would have been really annoying, I mean putting the images together took a couple hours. And that’s just for me. With accounts that have multiple users—do you really delete all the disk images on a business’s account, because one of their employees used compute to hit their spend limit? No, I think cloud billing is just inherently complicated.
- falcor84 1y ago
  > The only reasonable interpretation of “emergency stop on all charges completely” would be to delete those images I disagree; a reasonable but customer-friendly interpretation would be to move these into a read-only "recycle bin" storage for e.g. a month, and only afterwards delete them if you don't provide additional budget.
  - the8472 1y ago
    Which they already do for account closure, supposedly, I have never tested it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage-acct-closing.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage...
- appreciatorBus 1y ago
  Yeah I get it. It just irks that it's something I'd like to spend more time with and learn, but at every corner I feel like I'm exposing myself. For what I have done w/AWS & GCP so far with personal accounts, complete deletion of all resources & images would be annoying to be sure, but still preferable to unlimited liability. Ofc most companies using it won't be in that boat so IDK.
- exe34 1y ago
hamandcheese 1y ago
> The only conclusion I can come to is that these services are simply not made for small experimental projects, yet I also don’t know any other way to learn the services except by setting up toy projects Yeah, I'm sure this is it. There is no way that feature is worth the investment when it only helps them sell to... broke individuals? (no offense. Most individuals are broke compared to AWS's target customer).
yowlingcat 1y ago
This isn't a great answer to the overall issue (which I agree is a ridiculous dark pattern), but I've used Privacy.com cards for personal projects to hard spend at a card level so it just declines if it passes some threshold on a daily/weekly/monthly/lifetime basis. At work, I do the same thing with corporate cards to ensure the same controls are in place. Now, as to why they're applying the dark pattern - cynically, I wonder if that's the dark side of usage/volume based pricing. Once revenue gets big enough, any hit to usage (even if it's usage that would be terminated if the user could figure out how) ends up being a metric that is optimized against at a corporate level.
coredog64 1y ago
You can attach an action to that budget overage that applies a "Deny" to an IAM and limits costly actions (that's for small accounts not in an Org. Accounts with an Org attached also have the option of applying an SCP which can be more restrictive than an IAM "Deny")

sbarre 1y ago

I feel that the likely answer here is that instrumenting real-time spending limit monitoring and cut-off at GCP/AWS scale is Complicated/Expensive to do, so they choose to not do it. I suppose you could bake the limits into each service at deploy time, but that's still a lot of code to write to provide a good experience to a customer who is trying to not pay you money. Not saying this is a good thing, but this feels about right to me.

appreciatorBus 1y ago
I agree that that’s the likely explanation. It just feels infuriating that the services are sold as easy to get started and risk free with generous free tiers, inviting people and companies to try out small projects, yet each small experiment contains an element of unlimited risk with no mitigation tools.
Xelbair 1y ago
I don't care if it is expensive for them. I'm not running their business, I'm their customer - it is inconvenient for me. And frankly any pay-as-you-go scheme should be regulated to have maximum spending limit setting. Not only in IT.
- VectorLock 1y ago
  Its not expensive for them, its expensive for their customers. If you went over your spending limit and they deleted all your shit, people would be absolutely apoplectic. Instead they make you file a relatively painless ticket and explain why you accidentally went over what you wanted to spend. This is an engineering trade-off they made to make things less painful for their customers.
  - wpm 1y ago
    Why would I apoplectic at Amazon if I set “turn my shit off after it has accrued $10 in charges” to TRUE and they actually followed what I asked them to do?
    - vntok 1y ago
      Is it a serious question? Because then I could have you shutdown just by posting a call to ddos with a link to your search form on an anime image board.
      - ipaddr 1y ago
        You can freeze the account vs you can give someone a hundred thousand dollar bill? If you did this to a vps the instance might be unavailable until the traffic slows down but up after. Trust me you would rather they freeze your account.
      - wpm 1y ago
        OK? Good! That's what I want to happen! I want that. I do not care if some weirdos on an anime image board can't access some image. I don't want my credit card maxed out. Is that not a serious request? I play around in the same big-boy cloud as some SaaS company, but I'm on the free tier and I explicitly do not want it to scale up forever, and I explicitly do not want to destroy my credit or even think about having to call Amazon over a $100,000 bill because I set my shit up wrong or whatever. I want it to shut off my EC2 instance once it has used up whatever amount of resources is equal to $X. Obviously any world with this feature would also feature customizable restrictions, options, decision trees, etc etc. I don't think anyone is or was suggesting that someone's SaaS app just gets turned off without their permission.
heyitsguay 1y ago
Pass a law requiring cloud compute providers to accept a maximum user budget and be unable to charge more than that, and see how quickly the big cloud providers figure it out.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  So tell me again who we need a law? Can you cite one instance where any of the cloud providers refused to give a refund to someone?
  - ipaddr 1y ago
    The person who signs up for the free tier and is charged. https://medium.com/%40akshay.kannan.email/amazon-is-refusing-to-refund-more-than-2-343-in-fraudulent-charges-on-my-aws-account-3289ad01ead3 https://medium.com/%40akshay.kannan.email/amazon-is-refusing...
    - raw_anon_1111 1y ago
      There is no such thing as “signing up for a free tier” at least there wasn’t before July of this year. Some services have free tiers for a certain amount of time and others have an unlimited free tier that resets every month.
jay_kyburz 1y ago
Google App Engine had this when it first started.

bee_rider 1y ago

I’ve accidentally hit myself with a bigger than expected AWS bill (just $500 but as a student I didn’t really want to spend that much). So I get being annoyed with the pricing model. But, I don’t think the idea of just stopping charging works. For example, I had some of their machine image thingies (AMI) on my account. They charged me less than a dollar a month, totally reasonable. The only reasonable interpretation of “emergency stop on all charges completely” would be to delete those images (as well as shutting down my $500 nodes). This would have been really annoying, I mean putting the images together took a couple hours. And that’s just for me. With accounts that have multiple users—do you really delete all the disk images on a business’s account, because one of their employees used compute to hit their spend limit? No, I think cloud billing is just inherently complicated.

falcor84 1y ago
> The only reasonable interpretation of “emergency stop on all charges completely” would be to delete those images I disagree; a reasonable but customer-friendly interpretation would be to move these into a read-only "recycle bin" storage for e.g. a month, and only afterwards delete them if you don't provide additional budget.
- the8472 1y ago
  Which they already do for account closure, supposedly, I have never tested it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage-acct-closing.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/manage...
appreciatorBus 1y ago
Yeah I get it. It just irks that it's something I'd like to spend more time with and learn, but at every corner I feel like I'm exposing myself. For what I have done w/AWS & GCP so far with personal accounts, complete deletion of all resources & images would be annoying to be sure, but still preferable to unlimited liability. Ofc most companies using it won't be in that boat so IDK.
exe34 1y ago

hamandcheese 1y ago

> The only conclusion I can come to is that these services are simply not made for small experimental projects, yet I also don’t know any other way to learn the services except by setting up toy projects Yeah, I'm sure this is it. There is no way that feature is worth the investment when it only helps them sell to... broke individuals? (no offense. Most individuals are broke compared to AWS's target customer).

yowlingcat 1y ago

This isn't a great answer to the overall issue (which I agree is a ridiculous dark pattern), but I've used Privacy.com cards for personal projects to hard spend at a card level so it just declines if it passes some threshold on a daily/weekly/monthly/lifetime basis. At work, I do the same thing with corporate cards to ensure the same controls are in place. Now, as to why they're applying the dark pattern - cynically, I wonder if that's the dark side of usage/volume based pricing. Once revenue gets big enough, any hit to usage (even if it's usage that would be terminated if the user could figure out how) ends up being a metric that is optimized against at a corporate level.

coredog64 1y ago

You can attach an action to that budget overage that applies a "Deny" to an IAM and limits costly actions (that's for small accounts not in an Org. Accounts with an Org attached also have the option of applying an SCP which can be more restrictive than an IAM "Deny")