Yeah, you can't just implement it as a pure "stop all services immediately once I hit a set amount"

It needs to be more like "don't allow spinning up additional services after you hit this amount", although that still allows you to go over the limit by a lot, since most services are billed hourly.

It really is difficult to implement a spending cap that doesn't risk shutting down important things.

▲

onion2k 4 hours ago | parent [-]

It really is difficult to implement a spending cap that doesn't risk shutting down important things.

That's a checkbox decision for the customer. There needs to be the option of "This is important, never turn it off and I'll pay for any overages." versus "I want an entirely predictable bill up to $xxx, so stop my stuff as soon as possible over that."

It's not up to a cloud service to decide my website is more important than my money for me. That's my decision to make.

▲

chii 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> That's a checkbox decision for the customer.

and they would still complain if they got it wrong - it's always the platform/company's fault.

Look at banks and fraudulent transfers that customers themselves get phished into doing. The bank in the end usually take the hit (after the customer complains long enough). That's why there's all sorts of hoops and such to prevent customers from failing - and that causes friction for people regularly.

Therefore, the cloud company's decision to default safer is more correct from this perspective.

	▲	throwaway27448 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> and they would still complain if they got it wrong - it's always the platform/company's fault. I mean, it's really not unless they don't build it in the first place—that really is the platform's fault.

▲

tomjen3 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's more complicated than that.

You might be perfectly okay with having certain systems shut down, but you probably still want to pay for the archival storage of your important files.

That archival storage might be in several places, including one S3 bucket, whereas there might be another one that, contains copies of scraped Craigslist for X where you'd actually be happy that it just shut down.

This makes it far more complicated to do correctly, and as others pointed out, mostly relevant for hobbyist — this is not something you are going to make a lot of money from.

Better to spend engineering hours making an MCP for the dashboard or improving your Databricks setup.