Yet another Hacker News

We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

76 points elffjs 41 minutes ago 29 comments

modeless 29 minutes ago | parent

Wait, Google Cloud finally added hard caps on spending per service? I've been wanting that for so many years! They sure took their sweet time.

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/cost-management/new-ear...

kingcauchy 5 minutes ago | parent

What that's awesome? Yeah they definitely waited until the competitors did it first...

lacunary 25 minutes ago | parent

surprise $10k bill is getting off easy

dwattttt 21 minutes ago | parent

This guy only ended up with a ~$6k bill from his agent, not too shabby: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48500012

hyperhello 25 minutes ago | parent

These shouldn't even exist without a negotiated contract.

I can subscribe to your service for a specific fee on a monthly basis ($20/month say), and take the risk of losing that month's fee if your service or I make mistakes, or I can choose to drop another $20 mid-month, or anything for convenience.

Saying that the computer will "control" the billing and can run haywire tells me that I don't want to be anywhere near your pile of bad incentives.

mitxela 23 minutes ago | parent

Why would your vendor want to make it harder for you to accidentally give them a million dollars?

ares623 15 minutes ago | parent

Because I would go to the vendor who does.

wat10000 14 minutes ago | parent

Because it’s unlikely they’ll actually be able to collect that million dollars from a lot of those customers. Rephrased: why would your vendor want to make it harder to accidentally give you a million dollars of services in exchange for debt of dubious quality?

bl4kers 23 minutes ago | parent

It should be illegal to not have them

SV_BubbleTime 6 minutes ago | parent

Anytime someone says “there sight to be a law that…” there almost always shouldn’t be.

gausswho 23 minutes ago | parent

I wonder if BigCorp adding spending caps is due to them getting sick of customers solving it for themselves with virtual cards.

Arcuru 22 minutes ago | parent

Ubicloud does not have hard budget caps, which I only realized this morning after moving all my CI over to them over the past few months. Fortunately I didn't learn the hard way.

dpedu 20 minutes ago | parent

I'm surprised this isn't law. Should it be?

dboreham 4 minutes ago | parent

So if you use more electricity next month the CEO of the electric company should be put in jail?

anigbrowl 20 minutes ago | parent

Counterpoint: if you can automate API calls on the client side, why can't you automate billing caps? If you want a machine that can run 24-7 and make money for you while you sleep (which let's face it is the motivation for a lot of AI takeup), isn't the onus on you to install cicuit-breakers?

zanecodes 9 minutes ago | parent

Because many cloud services have incredibly complex or opaque pricing structures that make it difficult to impossible to determine how much something is going to cost you ahead of time, especially if it's usage-based a la network egress (and the usage statistics don't update frequently enough to make such circuit breakers possible to implement client-side).

Synthetic7346 19 minutes ago | parent

Yes and no. I suspect many of the hard limits were set arbitrarily, and we'll see a relaxation of limits as people get frustrated with the limited use they get out of them. And some services will genuinely need to be re written to support higher rps or risk losing customers

kadhirvelm 18 minutes ago | parent

What do people think of apps switching to a lower tier of model if your $$ threshold was exceeded?

gman83 15 minutes ago | parent

Cloudflare also doesn't have any hard budget caps.

gerdesj 9 minutes ago | parent

If you own a resource that is desired and paid for by usage then that's your income and the open market determines the money thing (price)

What on earth is Simon whittering on about?

russellbeattie 6 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

TZubiri 6 minutes ago | parent

These already exist, it's the most standard contract imaginable.

slopinthebag 5 minutes ago | parent

the premise seems a bit faulty to me. why should we be giving next token predictors access to spend our money? like what great benefit do we get from this that we should allow them unfettered access, but with safeguards in the form of hard budget caps?

altcognito 4 minutes ago | parent

So weird, cause it seems a lot of services are suddenly adding them. Huh, wonder what changed?