[noir_lord]

Any cloud platform should have a spend-stop amount built in.

i.e. if I know I average $10 a day, I should be able to put in a "If it hits $50, email me and take it offline".

Of course the opposite problem is then people setting that limit too low but since the user defines the limit that's on them not you.

This is one of the reasons I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly, yes it costs me more per month but the price is hard capped.

[kej]

This is something I really like about Nearly Free Speech.net. Their model is that you deposit funds up front, and they will deduct from those funds as you use services. It helps that they actually are nearly free so that a single $20 deposit can last for months or years in many cases.

It's bizarre to me that more services don't support billing this way, since there are tons of situations where I would much rather have a site or service go down than be hit with a surprise bill and have to depend on social media and magnanimous corporate PR.

[nazka]

Yes it’s nice like that. Specially for side projects on AWS that could go wrong on your personal credit card. Also I heard they forgave bills sometimes.

[pierat]

Amazon will, but they also gauge their discount in how many prevention and security measures from their 5 Pillars you follow in your environment.

You can do stuff like "disallow any of these instances to be used in your env", so if you never use graphics cards, disallow the whole class.

You can also set limits like "no more than 20x m5.4xlarge".

But again, AWS is the worst about no actual hard limits, cause each system generates bills. Ive also seen the hell of "hidden system AWS Billing doesnt have is still submitting billing and we dont know what it is". Again, AWS enables basically infinite liability.

Ive also discussed with C levels that "every engineer and dev with AWS logins have an unlimited credit card to of which you're on the hook for". Lets just say that 'heartburn' doesnt even begin to describe the terror on their faces.

[amtamt]

When people have to read and implement "5 pillars" or "cloud adoption frameworks" before start using cloud, learning stuff like hosting with hetzner or self hosting start to seems like comparatively easy and simple.

[pierat]

Exactly. Cloud was sold as "simple", but in reality you MUST know about data center operations, security in an effective zero-trust environment, failover vs HA vs load balancing, and so many footguns.

The big advantage to "cloud" was that you can provision more resources in seconds. Existing data centers had terrible non-VM and non-good VM management software that provisioning more CPU, RAM, storage was a weeks or months long trial.

And you can still get a 100k bill for hosting a SINGLE text file, cause DDoS and shitty hosting providers who demand unlimited credit is a thing.

[nick238]

Frequently I'm looking up if there's a way to have a hard limit on AWS billing, and it seems like many other people have the same concern as well. I do understand that the massively distributed system hosting 100+ products each with ~10 things to bill for means you can't have each service going to the magic billing limiter service and be ask "can account X spend 0.000001 USD now?" * every request * every cloud tenant, etc, etc.

That said, I still think there should be an easy way to set a daily limit. Should I use the Budget service to do that? Cost Explorer? Billing Alarms? Is it possible to have them shed whatever's spending all the money?...

Again, I see the whole can of worms here: what if your service is jamming tons of data into S3 because of a bug? Or you actually started something that got popular and you have a gigantic Dynamo table? Stopping an EC2 instance is maybe an easy call, but deleting data is iffy.

AWS just feels like a minefield because I'm occasionally worried with all the products, I'll check a box when creating an instance or SG or whatever, and that'll (e.g.) trigger CloudWatch to read all my logs, but I have some crappy debug config for some app which will vomit out dozens of logs a second accidentally, and instead of just trashing `/var/log/` I get billed for millions of log events or something.

[c120]

AWS doesn't have to check that for every request. They only have to eat the cost if you go over and use more before they shut you down. And the shut down should be in a way that they switch data to read only and give you a day to react before they delete.

They might even offer this as an insurance, so you pay a little more but can be sure you stay in budget.

[GirkovArpa]

Yes. Back around 2020 they forgave me a $1000 bill for a side project I thought was running on a free tier.

[mdekkers]

I absolutely love NFS and pay for the support option even though I don’t need it, simply to support them. Everything about that service is simply ace.

[bradly]

A couple years ago I switched from a standard, contract-based US cell phone plan to a prepaid service it has felt so much more natural. Have a messed up my autopay and my phone just stop working in the middle of the day? Yep. But You just find some WIFI, pay, and its back on in minutes. I know exactly what my service costs: $35 dollars. No fees, taxes.

[w0m]

> Have a messed up my autopay

I stopped ~all autopays when (Boost Mobile?) deduced 200 instead of 20usd from my debit account one month in college. They refunded the difference relatively quickly, but I racked up 5 or 6 overcharge fees before realizing; ended up being a pita for an already broke 18 y/o to figure out.

I was a broke and stupid kid. Never use a debit as an autopay. But since then I like to track where each penny goes as it goes.

[remram]

That sounds awful and it's not even cheap!

[bradly]

I guess that shows how bad the alternative is.

How much is unlimited talk, text, data, hotspot with a watch data add-on where you are from?

edit: Actually I was wrong–it is $30, not $35.

[themoonisachees]

My phone bill is 10€. I get unlimited calls and text, 100Gb 4G/5G then unlimited 3g, in France.

I could also get 50 MB data, 2h calls, unlimited texts for 2€.

[bradly]

How much to add a watch to the plan?

[remram]

In New York, I pay $26 for T-Mobile, one of the most mainstream carriers.

[bradly]

Weird. The cheapest T-Mobile non-prepaid plan I see is $50 + taxes and fees, and that is without watch service. The cheapest T-Mobile prepaid I see is $30 + taxes and fees, and that also is without a watch.

I pay $20 for the phone plan, and $10 for the watch add-on. No fees or taxes Feels reasonable to me.

[colecut]

I think for this purpose you could use something like privacy.com, generate a virtual credit card, and set a monthly limit on it. This way you don't have to deposit any money in advance.

[raiyu]

We did this at DigitalOcean for similar reasons, wasn't a feature that was commonly used. Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down.

What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties. And typically speaking a $104k bill would be hard to get paid up regardless if the customer's typical transaction balance was $5/mo and their credit card limit wouldn't be that high.

Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant.

[noir_lord]

> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant.

So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?.

That seems like bordering on fraud tbh.

> Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down.

Legit concern and something I mentioned, I'm gonna guess there are broad two camps on that one - mine which is "I want a safety ripcord" and "whee, nice problem to have".

However since this entire conversation is around a guy who got a massive invoice because of a bill he wasn't expecting and couldn't have set such a limit I'm still gonna go with a "I want a way to constrain the financial downside - hell turn it off by default but give me the option".

Since broadly a lot of cloud stuff doesn't, I'll constrain it a different way.

[kuboble]

So is the solution to have two thresholds? Notify me urgently if the traffic exceeds 100$, giving me a chance to evaluate what's going on but shut it down at 1000$ if I don't act.

[mattferderer]

> So your suggestion is to issue a chargeback.. to get money back that should under the terms of whatever service you signed up for be owed?.

Funny story... One of the big cloud providers actually has you do that on purpose as a remedy for an account you've lost access to.

[jedberg]

> Also, that's the benefits of credit cards - that you can still issue a charge back, and credit card companies very much favor the consumer rather than the merchant.

That has not been my experience. I've had to do a few chargebacks for services not rendered, and I've never won. I will submit my evidence, then the vendor will submit 100 pages of random emails, and then I will have my claim denied. Then I will appeal, will point out that they sent 100 random pages of email, and then they will reply with the same 100 pages of emails and I'll get denied again.

It seems that the vendors have found the hack for chargebacks -- just inundate the credit card company with so much data that they assume the vendor must be right.

It makes sense -- the vendors pay the credit card companies a lot more than I do. They'd rather keep them happy than me.

[jokethrowaway]

As a seller I have the opposite experience.

Plenty of morons just use the service and chargeback right before renewal so they got the service for free, some just chargeback instead of cancelling their plan or asking a refund. I get hit with 15$ bill plus I lose all the money even if I provided the service.

Whatever email / data from my system I send is ignored and the scammer / moron gets his money back.

I'm sure that's how it works if the vendor is large enough.

If you are a small fish you don't stand a chance, which is why for my next project (where I'm supposed to charge a lot and spend a lot on behalf of the user - and I'll be royally screwed if I start getting chargebacks on 500$ of which I've already spent 450$) I'll just accept crypto payments.

[sokoloff]

That's strange. I think I've done about 10 chargebacks over 35 years. All but one I "won" with just an initial submission and waiting. One my card company came back to me for additional details before also siding with me.

[aurareturn]

  Additionally, when you set that limit people then get upset because usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down.

But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to. You're giving the control back to the user.

[conductr]

How about just fix the pricing formula to account for massive surges.

Instead of forcing user to set a low cost limit and missing a viral opportunity or the platform writing off the massive bill the customer can't afford... just put the billing mode into a reduced price mode or have some more nuanced configurations. Sometimes is just asking the question the right way. Instead of "max spend limit" or similar "If your site goes viral, how many requests do you want to serve before going offline? 1M=$20, 10M=$100, etc" at this point, I feel like bandwidth consumption is a bad metric for billing; just use requests/visits/actions and price for those.

This is not prescriptive just illustrative. The point is make a better pricing formula to account for these massively unexpected events. Couple it with an aggressive notification policy when this traffic event gets triggered. The user should know the traffic pattern has changed and a high traffic event is happening. They can login and change the configs and decide if they want to keep it going or not.

[gwright]

> But that's on the user. The user shouldn't get upset in that scenario and has no right to.

I agree. I also agree that when dealing with large numbers of people, there will be people who don't understand this and/or will actively try to social engineer their way out of their own decisions.

Setting customer expectations and meeting them successfully isn't easy.

[typon]

The infantilization of the user is common in tech now. For good reasons? Maybe. But it is common.

[pierat]

The site user/admin saying "If this spend goes over $100, shut shit down" is called being a fiscally responsible adult.

The fact that most cloud operators don't have actual hard cutoffs to maintain financial responsibility is intentional. Azure does, but only for specific account types. If it's PAYG, you can't do it. The end result is if you do something "weird", or someone DDoS's you, you're liable.

With a hard limit, a DDoS just takes your site offline.

[ohnoitsahuman]

A debt is still a debt even charged back.

There would be many attorneys interested in collecting a $105k debt.

[quickthrower2]

Yes if a corporation says I owe them $100k I will lose sleep. Even if they don’t have my card details.

[dwighttk]

The secret is to bump that debt up to $100B

[quickthrower2]

There is a trope about how much you owe and thus whose problem it is.

[safety1st]

No, not really. Not really what attorneys do. There might be collections agencies interested in recovering the debt, but if it's some rando guy who doesn't have the money, even that is open to debate.

I mean I'm not familiar with every debt collection scenario under the sun but Internet randos seem to think this is a real thing where like a cloud/hosting company sends an army of lawyers to repo some guy's house and runs him into bankruptcy because of a traffic overage. I've never seen it work that way, what happens like with most business debts, is someone at the company negotiates with the debtor to try and get as much out of them as they can, and failing that, possibly refers it to a collections agency which does the same but plays a bit more hardball.

In the case here with Netlify even before it went viral they reduced the amount from $104K to $5K, no lawyers, collectors or repo men involved, and while I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days? Is this so bad on the part of Netlify?

All that said I'll just add that I've never given my credit card to any sort of host/cloud who had terms where they could bill unlimited overage fees like this. Never will unless there's a cap. Not Netlify not AWS not nobody. That goes for my personal life as well as for the business I operate. The terms is the terms and the answer is to not use these services unless you can afford them imho.

[nickjj]

> I'd hate to be stuck with that $5K bill, I dunno, that does feel closer to the mark of something that maybe you should be on the hook for if you're responsible for 200 TB of bandwidth overage over 4 days?

The responsibility part is the tricky part of the equation.

If someone hits your site with a DDoS attack, are you responsible? There's literally nothing[0] you can do as a customer of a cloud provider here because anything you can do is limited to the servers and services you're given access to. For example even if I had access to billions of requests and built an anti-DDoS tool it would still need to run within the cloud provider's provisioned server which means I'd be on the hook for all traffic costs because it's something running in my account.

That doesn't seem reasonable to me as a customer. It means a cloud hosting provider can put an extreme financial burden on a customer and make a killing in profits because of the markup they charge on bandwidth. The incentives are terribly misaligned.

[0]: I mean you can sign up for DDoS protection through a 3rd party company but in this case I'm talking about taking actions within your hosting provider.

[safety1st]

All fair points but do they apply to the Netlify situation? As I understand it they generally won't hold you liable for resource usage generated by a DDoS, the guy on Reddit said this was a DDoS, the Netlify CEO said the traffic "didn't match attack patterns..." I think telling a free tier customer that they owe $104K was a pretty stupid PR move either way, but we don't really have enough info to say whether this was a DDoS or not

[nickjj]

> As I understand it they generally won't hold you liable for resource usage generated by a DDoS

From personal experience as a customer of a cloud provider (not with Netlify btw), usually cloud providers who profit from bandwidth costs will write their TOS in such a way where almost nothing qualifies as a DDoS attack unless it's truly a distributed and targeted large scale attack specifically on your site.

A random person on the internet who spins up a few VPSs around the world and slams your site with looped curl requests won't count as a DDoS attack even though from your perspective that will result in a massive bill increase due to bandwidth costs.

In other words, I'm not surprised "didn't match attack patterns" was used. I'm guessing that will be the case most of the time.

[coryrc]

Traffic doesn't cost money. Bandwidth costs money. Unused bandwidth doesn't cost less than used bandwidth. So, no, you shouldn't pay so much for something that doesn't cost them any money?

[dboreham]

> Traffic doesn't cost money.

Mostly false. Either transit is billed on a 95th%ile basis (so...more money for more traffic), or if it is flat/netted, you're still paying for the capex for the switch ports (fatter connection to support more traffic means more $$$ for the gear to support it).

[jrockway]

What switch port costs $105,000 a month?

[coryrc]

At Netlify scale, it'll be the latter. And the appropriate thing to do with free-tier traffic is set lower QoS so it doesn't interfere with paid traffic. This, it doesn't have cost.

You can say "the sum total of free-tier traffic requires X additional connections" but the sudden burst of DoS traffic did not raise marginal costs (besides an inconsequential usage of electricity).

[ahmedfromtunis]

Here's an idea: let users set a spending limit.

If they're about to go over, shoot them a quick heads-up and give them 24 hours to sort things out or level up their package.

After that, if they haven't made any changes, temporarily pause their site access

[skeeter2020]

AWS budgets are good for the first part, but they have no interest in a hard cap for obvious reasons.

[gazelle21]

Im out of the loop, what obvious reasons?

[dns_snek]

They profit when their customers can't hard limit their spend and end up racking up large bills by accident, or for reasons outside of their control.

By the way, your comment was flagged which seemed odd, so I looked at your profile and it seems like all of your comments are being (automatically?) flagged and don't appear on HN by default. You might want to talk to the HN staff about that.

[nemothekid]

1. This doesn't seem like a rational thing to do. A trillion dollar business built on people making mistakes and actually running up a bill? Which exec is getting a bonus when little Johnny gets hit with a $1000 charge on his CS101 project? Doesn't seem likely.

2. To me, it's more likely they don't have one because there are edge cases to consider that make "hard limits" difficult to implement. What is AWS supposed to do when you hit the limit? Is it a hard limit? Ok, so when I hit my budget, all my s3 buckets get deleted and all my EBS drives get dropped? Do all my code deployments just get deleted? Do you "bless" certain services so that they continue to charge the user even after the hard limit? How is all of this communicated?

You can set an alarm in AWS today and the user can decide what to shut off. If you really need to, you can create a script that can hard nuke your account once a limit is reached; but I don't see why AWS should nuke your account for you.

[brnt]

That sort of adversarial weaponization of credit cards is really a US thing. In most of the world, payment is not relevant to the question of liability: you create a debt, whether or not you can debit a card. So, looks like DigitalOcean is another name to avoid.

Also: what's common? At the scale these companies so desire, small percentages are still thousands of users. Supporting them with what's ultimately a fairly trivial option shouldn't be seen as such a hassle.

[croemer]

Partially agree, yes the liability is independent of the payment. But in practice the one who has the money has the benefit of the status quo. The other party without money has to actively take legal action which is costly enough that it's often not pursued.

[brnt]

That again depends on jurisdiction. In much of the EU, this is not expensive and a thriving industry exists to support businesses to get bills paid.

[croemer]

Yes and no, collection costs significant proportions of the outstanding debt, and if you object to the collection of the debt saying it's not justified the business ultimately has to sue. Collector can't do everything.

[benterix]

Just want to chime in:

1) Thank you for allowing us to set the limit.

2) I understand your opinion that you prefer chargebacks but I disagree with it.

The very reason I stay with Hetzner is that I know in advance what my bills will be for the whole year. Heck, I even charge my account in advance so that I don't worry about any charges!

[charcircuit]

>that you can still issue a charge back

Most users don't want to be banned from their hosting provider.

[nico]

> usually when they go over it for a good reason, like going viral, they aren't anticipating it, and just when their traffic is most valuable the site is down

Of course. And that’s why any limit against a dynamic variable should also have alerts linked to it

Send an alert to the user when traffic starts spiking, especially if a simple projection shows it’s going to go over their limit

Then the user is aware, hopefully with enough time to lift the limit if needed

[ygjb]

That's a level of responsiveness that doesn't exist for the vast majority of organizations.

If your customer is aware enough to notice they are being hit with a DOS or legit traffic while it is happening, then great! They can respond, and if needed, engage proserve to get support for scaling or defense depending on needs.

If your customer is not alert enough, then their site is offline, and they won't hear about it until their customers are screaming at them, which will result in a P1 ticket to look at a vendor who won't turn them off during an unexpected peak.

It's a catch 22, and if you have to choose between: a) a PR hit because you have to go on a forum and post about waiving the fee, or b) a PR hit because someone posted a blog post about how you killed their site during a moment of critical growth

any reasonable business will choose A every time because A is far more supportive of customer growth and has drastically better optics. Anyone who thinks A is worse is probably too inexperienced to have an opinion.

[dns_snek]

> Anyone who thinks A is worse is probably too inexperienced to have an opinion.

I'd say the same about those who only think in absolutes.

That's a false dilemma. You can give your customers a choice in these matters with an optional hard limit, which I realize seems like a rather extreme idea these days.

Someone running a personal project will likely opt to have a low hard limit, say $10, while businesses will more likely opt in for alerts without, or with very high hard limits.

[Gormo]

> What Netlify is doing here is really the best approach for both parties.

Sort of, but the approach to the approach isn't great. If you're going to void charges from DDOS traffic anyway, you might as well make that explicit policy, rather than doing it after the fact in a way that seems discretionary.

The Reddit thread is full of people who are saying that they intend to pull their static content off of Netlify and move it to Cloudflare Pages, which has no overages on the free tier in the first place. I can tell you that I personally chose Cloudflare Pages to set up a new static site a couple of weeks ago, and Netlify wasn't even in the running.

If Netlify's free tier is important to their customer acquisition strategy, then they really need to retool how they're offering it, or Cloudflare is going to eat their lunch.

[joshjob42]

Just deleted my tiny personal site, and will reinstate it at Cloudflare Pages. Thanks for the tip!

[hex4def6]

It seems like that could be an option like:

Hard limit: [$1000]/mth or [$500]/24hr period

Notify me if traffic exceeds thresholds: [$800+]/mth or [$400]/24 hr period

Notify me if the traffic forecast for the month looks like it will exceed my hard limit before the end of the month.

[patmorgan23]

They still need to make tweaks to avoid sending $100k bills to people who signed up to a free service.

Like let them go over one month and then make them sign up for a paid plan for the next.

[conductr]

> I still in 2024 rent physical boxes and run the modern stuff on top of them directly, yes it costs me more per month but the price is hard capped.

I still prefer this too. Kinda funny how server resource limitations became a feature and not a bug when it was one of the problems the cloud sought to overcome

[albert180]

Physical Boxes at Hetzner and the likes are usually way cheaper than most cloud offerings

[conductr]

Cloud is somewhat managed though so charging a premium makes some sense. The blank check factor of how they price their services is a major risk IMO. Also a turn off how every single bit of functionality becomes productized with its own pricing model.

[c120]

Yes, any price that's not hard capped is unacceptable. One reason why I quit Amazon cloud after the trial year. No because they were too expensive, but there was no way to guarantee they wouldn't charge me more than planned...

[listenallyall]

If a cloud platform offers such a limit, but the user fails to set it up, then uses $100,000 of bandwidth, is the platform then justified in NOT forgiving the bill?