It’s incredible that in 2026, AWS and GCP are only just now introducing this. It’s possibly one of the most obviously needed features for a cloud provider.

Also, does anyone know why it’s taken this long? I suspect it’s a technical reason. While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision. Hard spending caps are both excellent product differentiators and could possibly save these providers money as they don’t have to forgive their users when they accidentally over-use a service.

It's one part technical, one part a product decision. The technical part is that billing is not actually instant. As a most basic example, a VM reports its billing units every X period of time it is active. If there is some network blip but it's still running, then that billing data could be delayed.

The product level decision is that "shut down everything" is something the customers you want to target don't actually want. Are we including deleting RDS data? S3? Glacier storage? If so then the headline will just change from "Hobbyist got charged XXXXXX on AWS" to "Business literally had all their data deleted because a hacker took over their VM and mined bitcoin". The only people who really want this are hobbyists and it's not a market segment that's worth chasing. Easier to do the status quo of forgive afterwards then even open the can of worms of deleting all of a business's data and all their backups just because they had a 100k overrun.

A very charitable take, in light of tech industry habits of exorbitant rent-seeking in scenarios of Platform Dominance (e.g. Google and Apple on the app store). We should remember AWS and Google companies are among the best in the world at A/B testing and extracting revenue from cloud services.

When you're one of only two real options out there, you can afford to demand users put up with things that on their surface seem ridiculous. Such as a billing system that (oops!) makes it difficult for customers to see where their costs are coming from, trim their largest sources of spend, notice meaningful changes in line item prices, or limit their spend. Wild how they can figure out a million different advanced services but gosh-darn-it can't figure out the hardtech of displaying line items.

Large enterprises can afford employees who are tasked full time with unwinding this capacity to mitigate the impact of these billing headaches. But I think this measure is introduced now because LLMs introduced a risk that these billing specialists could not control without caps.

I had a $.20/month recurring charge from AWS that I could only remove¹ by completely deleting my AWS account. That was enough to get me to give up on AWS for personal projects.

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1. The key word was “I.” Maybe someone more skilled at navigating AWS’s menu structure than I could would have done it quickly and easily, but even though I knew what it was for, turning it off and not getting billed for it turned out to be a huge challenge. Thankfully it was only $.20, but if I were using the service for something that generated actual bills, that $.20 (and possibly more) would end up quietly siphoning money out of my pocket into Amazon’s).

It's definitely technically difficult. You can't easily estimate how much an operation is going to cost before you kick off that operation, which means as soon as you get close to the limit you are at risk of tripping it.

Consider something like a "select * from bigtable" SQL query that might process a trillion rows. Hard to know that's going to cost $100 until after you have run it.

If these cloud providers had needed a standard customer acquisition strategy to grow to their current size, hard caps and other “training wheels” features would already be in place to get people interested in and comfortable using the platform, with the hope of eventually getting a foothold into Enterprise like most SaaS startups have to do (“enjoy our product on a side project and then recommend us to your CTO!”). But AWS and GCP got to start as in-house providers for their own constellations of massive sites and back out from that to serving other hyper scale businesses first. The lack of friendly on-ramps and starter account features is a reflection of that origin more than anything.

> While one could be cynical, I doubt it’s an intentional business/product decision

Why is egress more expensive than ingress in clouds? To lock in users.

Why cloudformation in some cases leaves s3 buckets laying around after destroy? To keep charging those cents.

Why no caps? To get the user into the mindset of we ll pay whatever they say, and charge the ones that dont notice or dont ask for the refund. Same reason why my newspaper subscription autorenews.

Nothing cynical about both of these. I think assuming it is technical is naive.

Because most enterprise users would much rather have overages in billing than outages. The opportunity costs on any serious service I deploy dwarfs usage pricing, at least at the level a generic cloud can determine.

So it’s a feature the best customers don’t want, that adds risk to those customers deployments, to appease the worst customers.

At least historically. Perhaps Simon is right that the calculation has changed.

This is one of those features that customers think they want without having thought it through:

“Never let me spend more than $X” also means, “Shut down my business-critical app/service/solution at 2 am on a Sunday morning because Joel in IT forgot to plan for the new report runs.”

The product design work to let customers have the first thing without risk of major pain from the second thing is non-trivial.

It is a technical reason. Basically cloud billing is much more granular and across many more services / line items than most things that basically the pipelines that figure out how much you have spent take a long time to know how much you have consumed. I believe all cloud providers with granular usage based billing have this problem.

> It’s incredible that in 2026, AWS and GCP are only just now introducing this. It’s possibly one of the most obviously needed features for a cloud provider.

GCP did have a budget cap previously. I think the new one is just more fine-grained to apply to specific services.

How do you hard-cap S3 and other persistent data storage?

"Sorry, you had a hard cap on AWS spend so we deleted all your S3 data on August 27th". Yeah not going to fly.

As a hobbyist, I pulled completely out of AWS when I realized the billing issues could never be resolved. Even/especially with tight monitoring and hard caps.

Even as a hobbyist, even as a most careful and judicious architect and admin, I could not prevent my VPS from incurring costs beyond my control. That means that the entire Internet, anyone with some kind of material access to the VPS, and especially any user or authorized entity, they could incur costs to me without bound and without notice until slapped with a bill.

Even something as simple as egress charges aren't under your control. So if people download enough data, you pay for all of it? It seems like an absurd proposition.

It's like opening a business somewhere in a war zone, and vandals and squatters are constantly attacking your storefront, and maybe you have a band of toughs as security and some good cops to defend awhile, but you're utterly in a war zone with adversaries acting far beyond your control.

As a hobbyist, I could never again justify running a pure VPS with the Linux and stack on top, as I ran before like the MediaWiki server. I was excited to learn all the vocabulary and skillsets of cloud services, but on the "free tier" uncapped, there was no telling when I'd be presented with costs beyond my ability to handle. And I do not see how a Fortune 500 would have any different calculus in this regard.

Most businesses in recent memory were "their own landlord" of on-prem equipment and machine rooms. Yeah, they began to outsource even their IT admin, but the machinery was in-house until the cloud services took over. Did we go through a phase of collective machine rooms or data centers with a collection of tenants? It seems we skipped from "homeownership" to "feudalism" with the Cloud Providers being the Princes [beyond mere Lords] who provide minimal resources to the serfs now. I can see many corporate execs who begin to hate "AI Data Centers" just for what they have become: a very attractive and irresistable way to reduce your capex and footprint and physical plant, by "migrating to the cloud" but is that really a better status quo after all your revenue is being pumped into AWS?

And in view of what I just wrote, a "hard budget cap" checkbox is even worse for you than runaway costs, because it will allow any determined adversary, butterfingered DevOps, or innocent fuckup, to shut you down and deny your service by hitting that cap. When a business experiences a service or infrastructure outage, they count that in dollars of revenue. Your "budget cap" will cost you money because it "paused your project" and your customers all got burned in turn.

Moving toward real solutions, just spitballing, but I can envision throttling and capping of everything, every billable service, monitored by the cloud provider and ensured that your services don't spill over into unmanageable territory. If your spend could be throttled and capped by-the-minute, by-the-hour, daily, then there is a start for it. But really, any service that incurs costs to you should have reasonable rate-limiting, throttling, caps and alerts that can help you manage it. I think all that stuff is currently missing but I am not a cloud admin, obviously. Cloud services obviously have perverse incentives to open the floodgates and bill as much as possible for any possibly legitimate usage that doesn't exceed their aggregate capacities. It's like LLMs today that just burn tokens like there's no tomorrow, because someone [you, not Mexico] will eventually pay for it all.