[nlitened]

I am very sure what you’re saying is not true. It’s a viable-looking technical excuse, but you can easily understand that it’s false.

Let’s make a thought experiment.

CEO of Cloudflare introduces hard billing caps at a _business_ (not technical) level. Your organization will never be billed more than the level you set. Your app may stop, or may continue running, but above the monthly cap it’s free for you, it becomes Cloudflare’s expense if they didn’t pause the services.

I guarantee you that in this case, all technical issues you’re talking about would be solved in three weeks, and your service would go down within 3 seconds after hitting the cap.

If CEO decision were that any over-usage above the cap is deducted from employee bonuses from the specific product division that didn’t stop spending in time — all technical challenges would be solved in 48 hours.

Currently, there are literally zero organizational incentives for CloudFlare to develop any usage caps

[AnthonyMouse]

You're describing a way to get the technical people to do the work, but that was never the problem. If you want them to do it you just tell them to, and then they spend however many hours doing it, instead of doing something else.

All technical problems are like that. You throw labor hours and hardware at them and progress is made. The question is, how much does it take, and is it worth that much? Which in turn depends on how willing you are to patronize someone else if they don't.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Isn't that the point OP made, only repeated?: The price cap functionality which customers want, is missing, not for lack of feasibility or capability (as was previously claimed above), but because the company makes more money overcharging customers, and thus doesn't want to fix the problem.

[AnthonyMouse]

The cynical option isn't the only one.

Suppose it would cost them X million dollars a year to provide the feature and providing it would cost them nothing in terms of sales, and indeed get them a few more because people like the feature. Well, it still costs them that amount to provide it, so then the question is whether X is less than Y. But you don't control how much it costs them to implement it, only how much of your business you're going to take somewhere else without it, and if nobody is willing to do that then why would you expect them to spend the money?

It doesn't have to be that they're purposely screwing you. It's just that if you don't care enough to choose differently then why would they?

[ImPostingOnHN]

> The cynical option isn't the only one.

> Suppose it would cost them X million dollars a year to provide the feature and providing it would cost them nothing in terms of sales, and indeed get them a few more because people like the feature. Well, it still costs them that amount to provide it, so then the question is whether X is less than Y.

lol, that is the cynical option!

It's just "we profit more by charging people for overages than we would if we put in a price cap", with more words!

It's the same as making a subscription people can enroll in online, but cancelling it requires going to the HQ in person, or writing a registered mail demand letter, etc.

After all, why build a way to cancel online subscriptions online if X is more than Y? Maybe it's more profitable to keep charging people for something they don't want.

"The cynical option" is any option which consistently puts pure profitability ahead of doing the right thing by customers, society, or human decency in general, and that is precisely the Cloudflare decision criteria we're discussing.

[AnthonyMouse]

We can distinguish between two things, right?

1) They don't build it because they purposely want to screw customers with overage charges.

2) They don't build it because building it costs money and the customer demand (i.e. willingness to switch) over that feature isn't sufficient to justify the expense.

The first one is way more cynical than the second one.

[ImPostingOnHN]

The first one is a straw man, a cartoon villain misanthrope. If your point is "at least they hurt people for money, rather than out of savage hatred", I guess that is an optimistic way of seeing things.

The second one is what everyone here is talking about, and it is the cynical option. The non-cynical option would be doing the right thing every once in a while, even if it doesn't earn profits.

[nlitened]

That’s kinda my point. We don’t have usage caps not because they are technically hard or impossible to implement (they’re not). It’s because the leadership thinks (likely correctly) that implementing them would just hurt company’s bottom line.

[jt2190]

> [L]eadership thinks (likely correctly) that implementing them would just hurt company’s bottom line.

Exactly. There's little "win" here for the business, especially when the simpler "just cap at n requests" solution exists. Pursuing this solution:

- introduces more technical complexity (increased cost of developing, testing and maintentance)

- forces overage costs onto the vendor, who will then... increase prices to cover these costs, which upsets customers and makes the company less competitive.

- doesn't improve cost prediction (since n requests can be costed out a $/request quite easily and reliably)

(The cynical will say something about "the business has an incentive to _not_ fix this issue because they get paid for overages", but this assumes that Cloudflare has the, "monopolistic" market power to make customers unhappy and still charge whatever they want. In this case implementing billing caps wouldn't do anything because Cloudflare could just... charge whatever they want.)

[mentat]

You’re very sure because you’ve built one at scale? This is such peak HN. And you have plenty of other people who have never built a billing system at scale to agree with you. The OP is right, this is in fact very very hard for the reasons they say.