[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".

[newaccount74]

You are twisting my words. I said it's easy to predict storage costs, to counter your claim that you'd need to delete data to stay within budget.

The biggest problem are mainly exorbitant bandwidth costs, and those are trivial to cap -- just stop serving requests.

Also, billing alarms are not a soft cap. They don't prevent you from waking up in the morning to a 5000€ bill.

> You didn't actually provide any solution here.

I'm commenting on the internet, I don't need to come up with a way for AWS to implement billing caps, especially since they have designed their service pricing in a way that makes estimates really hard.

But for most services, billing caps really aren't that hard, especially since the company we are discussing here (fly.io) apparently already allows billing caps if you prepay (according to other comments here).

[manigandham]

> "it's easy to predict storage costs"

You're just repeating this. Predictable is the opposite of surprise.

Even if storage use was very stable, so what? The overall bill is the problem so where the charges come from doesn't matter, only that eventually a limit is crossed. An overage is still an overage and the only way for billing to stop immediately is to delete and drop everything. This is the fundamental issue that you're not considering. It's what happens at the limit, not about how you get there.

> " billing alarms are not a soft cap"

Soft caps that don't actually stop anything are effectively nothing more than billing alarms. What else is their purpose?

> "I don't need to come up with a way for AWS to implement billing caps"

I didn't ask for implementation, I'm inquiring as to what logically is supposed to happen in the scenarios that occur based on your proposed "pretty simple" solution. If you can't answer then it's not so simple is it? You either haven't thought it through entirely to conclude that it's not actually possible to do that way.

> "designed their service pricing in a way that makes estimates really hard"

How so? You also keep repeating this without evidence. How is providing numbers on exactly what they charge for make it difficult? It's as transparent as it gets. They also have a calculator on their site. What more are you expecting?

> "for most services, billing caps really aren't that hard"

The nature of the service changes everything. Fly.io doesn't have billing caps, they just stop the apps when the credits run out and eat the bandwidth cost for now. The economics of scale can change that answer drastically, however even Fly repeats what I've said before: "the majority of people want their stuff to stay up" and "shut it down so you don't get billed" is usually not the preferred solution compared to negotiating a large bill.