[pradn]

Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers. All workloads using that billing account would be impacted immediately.

If they weren't turned off at the billing cap, but were given some leeway instead, either that becomes the new hard limit, or GCP will have to give away the difference.

And there's no "middle ground" you could implement that makes sense either - like a "frozen" state. Preventing new writes to a GCS bucket breaks the writer app. Freezing VMs serving web traffic takes the site down.

Even if the service was shut down once the billing limit is hit, how long would GCP wait for the user to add funds or raise the limit? GCP would need to either keep the services in a hidden/frozen state or not turn them off / freeze them at all (in which case GCP would be giving away resources for free).

Maybe GCP can give users a heads-up when they're about to hit the limit? GCP already does - billing alerts do exist. It's just possible to blow past them if your usage is a massive spike.

Moreover, getting the hundreds of GCP services to implement a "frozen" state is difficult. It's hard enough getting everyone to listen to the "billing account disabled" signal, and (soft-)delete the resources (based on the resource, after some time interval). Given these billing overruns happen for smaller customers, it's not really worth solving the problem - which I don't think has a great solution to begin with.

[Havoc]

>Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.

That's why you make it opt in with suitable disclaimers about data loss from deletions (a warning which btw GCP already shows you when you disable billing on an active project).

I'd say the average person is well positioned to determine whether they're a broke student that can't afford a $1000 surprise or a corporation that needs reliability above all.

[like_any_other]

> Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.

Those customers that would rather get a surprise $18,000 bill than have their servers stopped or data nuked, can simply not enable the spending limit.

[cute_boi]

Well they can give nuclear option and freeze everything. And they can send email every day till 7 days?

There is better option here, but google won't as it will hurt their incentive to take more money from customer.

[ekimekim]

> Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.

And yet this is exactly what happens if you exceed a quota limit, which aren't always well signposted and sometimes require days to get the limit raised. I've experienced multiple hours-long outages due to hitting GCP quotas we didn't know existed.