The problem with hard caps is that there's no way to retroactively fix "our site went down". As much as engineers are loathe to actually reach out to a cloud provider, are there any anecdotes of AWS playing hardball and collecting a 10k debt for network traffic?

Conversely the first time someone hits an edge case in billing limits and their site goes down, losing 10k worth of possible customer transactions there's no way to unring that bell.

The second constituency are also, you know, the customers with real cloud budgets. I don't blame AWS for not building a feature that could (a) negatively impact real, paying customers (b) is primarily targeted at people who by definition don't want to pay a lot of money.

Keeping the site up makes sense as a default. Thats what their real business customers needs so that has priority.

But an opt in „id rather you deleting data/disable than send me a 100k bill“ toggle with suitable disclaimers would mean people can safely learn.

Thats way everyone gets what they want. (Well except cloud provider who presumably don’t like limits on their open ended bills)

Since you would have to have set it up, I fail to see how this is a problem.

I'd much rather lose 10k in customers that might potentially come another day than 10k in Amazon bill. Amazon bill feels like more unringable.

But hey, let's say you have different priorities than me. Then why not bot? Why not let me set the hard cap? Why Amazon insists on being able to bill me on more than my business is worth if I make a mistake?