I think your position is essentially that you mostly want to serve people who have serious apps, for whom the cap idea doesn’t work. And you definitely know more about the general trajectory of your customers than all of us sitting here randomly speculating. But, is it really so uncommon for an application to transition from unserious, I want to cap, to serious?
I guess I’m slightly confused because I thought one of the nice things about cloud services is that they give you the ability to fit your infrastructure to your size while you are trying things. If I’m still trying things, I might not even know if I’m serious yet, right?
Sure, but bear in mind that across the entire industry of public clouds, which has been around for something like 2 decades now, nobody really has this feature. In fact, didn't Google have this feature and then pull it?
I've def. wanted to have spending caps on a lot of my projects. The ones I've tried: AWS and GCP made this ridiculously difficult. It might be that they will waiver the bill, but the general feeling that they get to decide if I go bankrupt or not is nightmare fuel.
In the end, I've just set up a 5$ vps where I self-host all my apps. That removes all the stress.
Yeah, so one issue we run into here is that we're not trying to get you to stop using $5 VPS's. That is not good business for us! There is nothing at all wrong with managing your own servers.
Yes, clearly is it not the convention to provide this feature. But the chain of thought seems so straightforward and obvious to me: cloud infrastructure is great for exploring what you’ll be doing, and guardrails make you more willing to explore fearlessly. I’m obviously missing something, though!
It’s also easy to see why the convention would be to not have it. It earns the provider more money. After all, not every customer will ask for forgiveness for a surprise bill.
This is not why we don't have caps. Maybe it's why AWS doesn't. This simply isn't how we make our money. Our top line is dominated by companies growing businesses with us. Getting a hobbyist to cough up an extra $100 doesn't move a single dial for us.
I guess I’m slightly confused because I thought one of the nice things about cloud services is that they give you the ability to fit your infrastructure to your size while you are trying things. If I’m still trying things, I might not even know if I’m serious yet, right?