[manigandham]

That's limited to free tiers that usually deactivate or delete if there's too much usage.

Anything with production usage and pay-as-you-go pricing means data at rest still costs money - and requires deleting to avoid accruing new charges. Do you want your databases and volumes and object storage deleted when your app stops?

And if this was offered then there would be a whole new class of mistakes leading to lost data. Like I said, billing is easier to negotiate than deleted accounts.

[newaccount74]

The high charges are almost never storage costs, its almost always processing or bandwidth.

And storage costs are simple to predict -- as soon as you see the cap would be exceeded, stop accepting new data.

[manigandham]

Overages are overages, whether its 1 penny or thousands of dollars. Data also still costs money per time and can be unpredictable.

This kind of pacing and billing buffer is an immense amount of complexity at scale for very little benefit (even if an individual user might like it).

[newaccount74]

Can be unpredictable? How would data storage costs increase if you stopped accepting new data?

SaaS companies manage to pull of ridiculously complicated things, but coming up with a billing scheme that does fuck over the customer is asking too much?

The simple truth is that usage based pricing is designed to be unpredictable, and surprising customers with high bills is probably considered a feature, not a bug.

[manigandham]

Data (and all resources) cost money per time. You don't need to add new data to an S3 bucket to get a bill every month because the existing data accrues charges.

The billing scheme is very transparent and friendly by being pay-as-you-go. It doesn't "fuck over the customer".

Your entire complaint isn't about the pricing scheme but about an additional feature to stop billing at some point - which I've explained is not easy to calculate precisely because charges accrue on time and adding even more complexity for calculations and potential for mistakes is not worth it for the many reasons I outlined previously.

> "The simple truth"

You keep repeating that word. There is nothing simple about this. Let's end this here.

[newaccount74]

> You don't need to add new data to an S3 bucket to get a bill every month because the existing data accrues charges.

Yes, but it's pretty predictable. Once there's enough data in your bucket that the monthly cost would go over the limit, just stop accepting new data.

Nobody cares if the spending limit is accurate to the cent. What people care about is not being surprised by huge invoices.

> The billing scheme is very transparent and friendly by being pay-as-you-go.

Have you looked at eg. the glacier pricing scheme, or at lambda pricing? It's almost impossible to know how much it's going to cost you ahead of time. The only thing you know is that if you happen to use it differently than anticipated, it's going to be expensive.

[manigandham]

> "it's pretty predictable"

It quite literally isn't, otherwise there would be no billing surprises in the first place. Your entire argument about predictability is counter to the problem of unpredictable charges.

> "just stop accepting new data"

This is still effectively data loss and a major problem in production. Customers would rather negotiate a bill than lose data.

> "Nobody cares if the spending limit is accurate to the cent. What people care about is not being surprised by huge invoices."

Then it's a soft-cap, and if that's all you want then you already have billing alarms. Otherwise what's the buffer amount? What overage is acceptable? Is there a real hard cap? What if that's reached? You didn't actually provide any solution here.

> "the glacier pricing scheme, or at lambda pricing ... It's almost impossible to know how much it's going to cost you ahead of time."

How so? AWS is completely transparent about pricing. The calculations for it might be hard, but that's an entirely different issue. There are plenty of tools you can use if you don't want to do it yourself, however this is another logically incongruent point where you claim billing is easy enough to calculate and predict accurately for caps yet simultaneously hard enough that it's "almost impossible".

[brundolf]

> billing is easier to negotiate than deleted accounts

Maybe, but I'd still like the option. My blog site is stateless so I couldn't care less if the service got deleted