[leros]

Most of their money is coming from larger customers. So the small customer afraid of going over budget isn't a major concern.

They'd also rather give refunds for accidental overages than build in billing shutoffs. There are two reasons for this:

1) Their infrastructure doesn't have realtime tracking for usage so they can't detect you're over budget until some time after you've surpassed it already.

2) There is a decision that most customers would rather go over budget when something happens than have their services get shut off.

[longhairedhippy]

This is the real reason, why worry about people/orgs that don't have money? Plus, can you imagine blast radius of a bug in the system that could get a bad signal and shutdown your entire infrastructure? As a rule, I always try to avoid any pattern where touching/changing one thing will cause everything to fail. There is currently a mechanism in AWS to shutdown/delete resources for non-paying customers (disclaimer: used to work there), however it has an enormous amount of checks and balances, as well as a significant time lag before actually removing everything, in order to cut down on false positives.

Having said all this, I would love it if this was actually a feature. I watch my personal AWS account I use for toy projects with great anxiety that one day I will get a luxury new car sized bill.