5 ms·

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps. I want to set a cap of $100/mo

by simonw 4mo ago

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps. I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s. The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#workers https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing/#...

sofixa 4mo ago
Never going to happen at such a platform. They prefer waiving the occasional DDoS / misconfiguration over giving their customers to cause outages with something so trivially forgotten about and so disconnected from the tech and actual platform.
Zababa 4mo ago
Yeah, especially with agents this seems necessary.
cj 4mo ago
Not that it helps, but I think this is only a problem if you’re paying by credit card. If your company is on an enterprise plan, at least for us all of the limits are pre-negotiated and prepaid, and you aren’t billed for overages (although if you consistently overage, sales will start badgering you to negotiate a limit increase, but my experience is you can simply ignore their demands and they eventually go away) It does drive me crazy that their enterprise tier “caps” bandwidth. Our company overaged on one of our domains, so we moved the domain out of our enterprise license onto a self-serve plan, and like magic, back to unlimited bandwidth.
- iancarroll 4mo ago
  My Cloudflare enterprise order form has costs for overages for Workers and the following language about everything else: > If Customer exceeds any of the Total Quantity for the Services below, Cloudflare will invoice Customer in arrears at a rate that corresponds to the rate set forth in the table after this one labeled “Excess Usage Pricing.” If no such Excess Usage Pricing table has been added by the Parties to this order form or if such table does not include the Service(s) for which Customer has exceeded the Total Quantity, then the Parties will negotiate in good faith an increase in the Fees for such Service(s). Should the Parties fail to reach an agreement on an increase within thirty (30) days of Customer’s receipt of notice from Cloudflare that Customer has exceeded its usage cap for the Service(s), Cloudflare will have the right to immediately terminate such Service for its convenience, and without liability to Customer or any third party.
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
- philistine 4mo ago
  Didn't Cloudflare promise they would deliver every single Enterprise-only feature to the paid tier? There's your next feature to port, Cloudflare: PEACE OF MIND!
- lmz 4mo ago
  > It does drive me crazy that their enterprise tier “caps” bandwidth. Our company overaged on one of our domains, so we moved the domain out of our enterprise license onto a self-serve plan, and like magic, back to unlimited bandwidth. You don't see how the spend cap is linked to the bandwidth cap?
Havoc 4mo ago
Haven't shipped or don't want to ship...
zuzululu 4mo ago
tbh this is my biggest anxiety with cloudflare and this seems intentional also its funny that i have a backup to cloudflare in case it goes down—that seems to be a regular event now as of lately with CF
jedberg 4mo ago
I've dealt with this before. The problem with doing a billing cap is that now you are bringing an out-of-band batch system (billing) in-band. The only way to do a dollar cap is to constantly calculate your bill. Capping it at 100K requests is a lot easier, because it's a single number that can be incremented easily in a distributed way. It's the same reason it took AWS forever to offer billing caps, and even today, they label it as best effort. They don't guarantee you won't pay more than your set limit.
- MikeNotThePope 4mo ago
  How about implementing a prepaid system where you set your budget, and if you exceed it, everything just pauses until you pay more?
  - _heimdall 4mo ago
    That wouldn't change anything in this case. Either way you would need to (a) be able to know the state of billing in band before executing a request or (b) accept a slight out of band delay where cloudflare may allow a few extra requests through and eat the cost. It is a very solvable problem, I just don't think pre- vs postpaid changes it.
- londons_explore 4mo ago
  Seems like a weak excuse... If you build a billing system which can calculate bills with low latency 99.9% of the time, but perhaps fails when there is a net split for example, then you can simply let the company write off the loss for that 0.1% of the time the billing system is down.
  - manwe150 4mo ago
    This seems the real answer. The question of whether the billing team can set accurate maximums is largely disjoint from the question of whether the engineering team shuts off service precisely at that moment.
- nlitened 4mo ago
csomar 4mo ago
To be honest their service is so cheap, that it's extremely unlikely to get such an attack without costing the attacker an equally equivalent amount. Also, if it's really a problem or you are estimating it'll certainly be a problem, do email alerts or a strict shutdown if xx requests are hitting your account. You can have a simple counter in a KV.
yanslookup 4mo ago
This smells like a cottage industry similar to detecting soon to be expired ssl certs. "Oh that thing that was an experiment and had billing caps turned on but we rushed in to production and now the whole business relies on that thing is in an outage and destroying customer trust we've barely earned yet" I get the flip side but... 2nd order effects oof.
__natty__ 4mo ago
I wonder why they didn’t introduce this yet. Same anbout other cloud providers. It’s not that this is some rocket science technology to achieve because they calculate near realtime usage anyway. Can this be because they earn more on people going beyond what they would set limit?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
devdoshi 4mo ago
If it weren't implemented by cloudflare natively, would you be ok using a library or something that wraps or hooks onto your IaC to wrap entry points with a worker (proxy or circuit-breaker, conceptually) with various types of limits (real-time estimated spend, or just counts of operations, or just a on/off switch wired to an email alert). I'm pulling a few of these threads at the moment since I've been ramping up my cloudflare usage.
tracerbulletx 4mo ago
It's not valuable for them to have this, and not because they want to skim big bills off of little guys. It's because customers small enough to care about this are not only not worth the investment in the feature, even having them on the platform is nearly a net negative.
- yencabulator 4mo ago
  Having the little guys on Cloudflare is most of the reason why HN regularly talks about Cloudflare.
AsterXing 4mo ago
[flagged]

by simonw 4mo ago

sofixa 4mo ago

Never going to happen at such a platform. They prefer waiving the occasional DDoS / misconfiguration over giving their customers to cause outages with something so trivially forgotten about and so disconnected from the tech and actual platform.

Zababa 4mo ago

Yeah, especially with agents this seems necessary.

cj 4mo ago

Not that it helps, but I think this is only a problem if you’re paying by credit card. If your company is on an enterprise plan, at least for us all of the limits are pre-negotiated and prepaid, and you aren’t billed for overages (although if you consistently overage, sales will start badgering you to negotiate a limit increase, but my experience is you can simply ignore their demands and they eventually go away) It does drive me crazy that their enterprise tier “caps” bandwidth. Our company overaged on one of our domains, so we moved the domain out of our enterprise license onto a self-serve plan, and like magic, back to unlimited bandwidth.

iancarroll 4mo ago
My Cloudflare enterprise order form has costs for overages for Workers and the following language about everything else: > If Customer exceeds any of the Total Quantity for the Services below, Cloudflare will invoice Customer in arrears at a rate that corresponds to the rate set forth in the table after this one labeled “Excess Usage Pricing.” If no such Excess Usage Pricing table has been added by the Parties to this order form or if such table does not include the Service(s) for which Customer has exceeded the Total Quantity, then the Parties will negotiate in good faith an increase in the Fees for such Service(s). Should the Parties fail to reach an agreement on an increase within thirty (30) days of Customer’s receipt of notice from Cloudflare that Customer has exceeded its usage cap for the Service(s), Cloudflare will have the right to immediately terminate such Service for its convenience, and without liability to Customer or any third party.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
philistine 4mo ago
Didn't Cloudflare promise they would deliver every single Enterprise-only feature to the paid tier? There's your next feature to port, Cloudflare: PEACE OF MIND!
lmz 4mo ago
> It does drive me crazy that their enterprise tier “caps” bandwidth. Our company overaged on one of our domains, so we moved the domain out of our enterprise license onto a self-serve plan, and like magic, back to unlimited bandwidth. You don't see how the spend cap is linked to the bandwidth cap?

Havoc 4mo ago

Haven't shipped or don't want to ship...

zuzululu 4mo ago

tbh this is my biggest anxiety with cloudflare and this seems intentional also its funny that i have a backup to cloudflare in case it goes down—that seems to be a regular event now as of lately with CF

jedberg 4mo ago

I've dealt with this before. The problem with doing a billing cap is that now you are bringing an out-of-band batch system (billing) in-band. The only way to do a dollar cap is to constantly calculate your bill. Capping it at 100K requests is a lot easier, because it's a single number that can be incremented easily in a distributed way. It's the same reason it took AWS forever to offer billing caps, and even today, they label it as best effort. They don't guarantee you won't pay more than your set limit.

MikeNotThePope 4mo ago
How about implementing a prepaid system where you set your budget, and if you exceed it, everything just pauses until you pay more?
- _heimdall 4mo ago
  That wouldn't change anything in this case. Either way you would need to (a) be able to know the state of billing in band before executing a request or (b) accept a slight out of band delay where cloudflare may allow a few extra requests through and eat the cost. It is a very solvable problem, I just don't think pre- vs postpaid changes it.
londons_explore 4mo ago
Seems like a weak excuse... If you build a billing system which can calculate bills with low latency 99.9% of the time, but perhaps fails when there is a net split for example, then you can simply let the company write off the loss for that 0.1% of the time the billing system is down.
- manwe150 4mo ago
  This seems the real answer. The question of whether the billing team can set accurate maximums is largely disjoint from the question of whether the engineering team shuts off service precisely at that moment.
nlitened 4mo ago

csomar 4mo ago

To be honest their service is so cheap, that it's extremely unlikely to get such an attack without costing the attacker an equally equivalent amount. Also, if it's really a problem or you are estimating it'll certainly be a problem, do email alerts or a strict shutdown if xx requests are hitting your account. You can have a simple counter in a KV.

yanslookup 4mo ago

This smells like a cottage industry similar to detecting soon to be expired ssl certs. "Oh that thing that was an experiment and had billing caps turned on but we rushed in to production and now the whole business relies on that thing is in an outage and destroying customer trust we've barely earned yet" I get the flip side but... 2nd order effects oof.

__natty__ 4mo ago

I wonder why they didn’t introduce this yet. Same anbout other cloud providers. It’s not that this is some rocket science technology to achieve because they calculate near realtime usage anyway. Can this be because they earn more on people going beyond what they would set limit?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

devdoshi 4mo ago

If it weren't implemented by cloudflare natively, would you be ok using a library or something that wraps or hooks onto your IaC to wrap entry points with a worker (proxy or circuit-breaker, conceptually) with various types of limits (real-time estimated spend, or just counts of operations, or just a on/off switch wired to an email alert). I'm pulling a few of these threads at the moment since I've been ramping up my cloudflare usage.

tracerbulletx 4mo ago

It's not valuable for them to have this, and not because they want to skim big bills off of little guys. It's because customers small enough to care about this are not only not worth the investment in the feature, even having them on the platform is nearly a net negative.

yencabulator 4mo ago
Having the little guys on Cloudflare is most of the reason why HN regularly talks about Cloudflare.

AsterXing 4mo ago

[flagged]