No, we don't bill people for traffic from attacks. We also waive fees from big, legitimate bursts. The intent of our bandwidth pricing is to allow high usage, sustained bandwidth workloads. It's not to sneak one over on you.
How about large traffic from a legitimate spike (e.g. front page of reddit or HN)?
You have enumerated a lot of alternatives so far (prepaying, waiving attack costs) but you still haven't addressed the number one scenario that everybody has been asking about, and which was the reason why Heroku was such a hit: do you offer a flat fee which, if exceeded, simply shuts down the app until the next billing cycle?
I apologize for being skeptical but the wording in the contract seems to be extremely handwavy and they don't give me any confidence that if my bill goes from $4 to $200 that month because I made it to the front page of reddit, my bandwidth will magically be waived.
Right now, I feel 100% sure that my credit card would get charged.
Contractually? I doubt it. But they have refunded many, many people on their forums after they report accidental charges. Whether they continue is a different story, but I feel safe using it and certain that I won't be overcharged.
To be clear a bandwidth limit would be awesome! And the pricing may not be for everyone. However there is a large amount of leeway as evidenced by the community forum posts.
Good will does not feel like a good way to scale this. For a business that might be ok, but I’m highly unlikely to recommend to a business something I haven’t personally investigated, and I’m not writing cheques whose value is dependent on the good will of a startup.
I don’t understand why cloud providers will not accommodate this basic “prepay to X and allow me to use the credit” model.
You have enumerated a lot of alternatives so far (prepaying, waiving attack costs) but you still haven't addressed the number one scenario that everybody has been asking about, and which was the reason why Heroku was such a hit: do you offer a flat fee which, if exceeded, simply shuts down the app until the next billing cycle?