[onion2k]

The reasons are probably quite complicated, because some of them are bound by hard technical limits to how quickly a system can react and thus make a hard limit actually a hard limit, but realistically that's largely solvable just by making it a softer hard limit (eg you set a limit of $1000 and the terms say you pay that plus whatever is used before the limit kicks in. More that $1000 but way less than $14000).

All of those technical reasons aside though, the commercial reason is obvious - people's mistakes and overages are a great source of revenue and profit. Companies refund the times where it'd be enough to lose the customer, or when it hits HN, but they make more money every time someone pays up. They have no incentive to fix it. It's part of the business model.

[londons_explore]

There is also the fact that if a company has critical systems go down because GCP hit some hard budget limit, it will be reported in the press as "Netflix down globally due to issue with Google Cloud".

Google doesn't want the bad press. Most real companies would prefer to have a big bill when their product surges in popularity than have unexpected downtime at the worst time.

[Turing_Machine]

> Most real companies would prefer to have a big bill when their product surges in popularity than have unexpected downtime at the worst time.

That doesn't preclude it being an option.

[beejiu]

There are no conceivable "hard technical limits" that make such a system difficult. It's 100% commercial.

[londons_explore]

oh there are - billing systems at scale almost exclusively work on logs. Logs can take minutes or hours to aggregate and transmit to a central place.

Ever notice how your "1GB" data plan sometimes lets you use 5GB if you happen to be roaming in another country and downloading something fast over 5G...? Same reason.

[oaiey]

They are also checking your account .. and as easy as you can lock an account, as easy you can soft lock it via a flag because the billing system says enough. And the few cents in between they swallow easily (as with so many other inaccuracies).

They do not want it, that is the only reason.

[thehappypm]

It’s really not part of the business model.

Sure, this guy fat-fingering $10k sounds amazing.

But GCP deals with businesses paying for years of service. Multi million dollar deals are common.

Google and AWS and the like could give a flying fuck about anything under $100k.