We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

modeless

Wait, Google Cloud finally added hard caps on spending per service? I've been wanting that for so many years! They sure took their sweet time. https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/cost-management/new-ear... Edit: Ugh it's fake. Literally only works for four random services, unsupported for all the rest. Completely useless for all of my projects. Also dumb that the only supported term is "monthly" considering that months are different lengths, and that they don't bother to account for credits or discounts. Maybe next decade they'll get around to implementing something useful.

lacunary

surprise $10k bill is getting off easy

hyperhello

These shouldn't even exist without a negotiated contract. I can subscribe to your service for a specific fee on a monthly basis ($20/month say), and take the risk of losing that month's fee if your service or I make mistakes, or I can choose to drop another $20 mid-month, or anything for convenience. Saying that the computer will "control" the billing and can run haywire tells me that I don't want to be anywhere near your pile of bad incentives.

mitxela

Why would your vendor want to make it harder for you to accidentally give them a million dollars?

bl4kers

It should be illegal to not have them

gausswho

I wonder if BigCorp adding spending caps is due to them getting sick of customers solving it for themselves with virtual cards.

Arcuru

Ubicloud does not have hard budget caps, which I only realized this morning after moving all my CI over to them over the past few months. Fortunately I didn't learn the hard way.

dpedu

I'm surprised this isn't law. Should it be?

anigbrowl

Counterpoint: if you can automate API calls on the client side, why can't you automate billing caps? If you want a machine that can run 24-7 and make money for you while you sleep (which let's face it is the motivation for a lot of AI takeup), isn't the onus on you to install cicuit-breakers?

Synthetic7346

Yes and no. I suspect many of the hard limits were set arbitrarily, and we'll see a relaxation of limits as people get frustrated with the limited use they get out of them. And some services will genuinely need to be re written to support higher rps or risk losing customers

kadhirvelm

What do people think of apps switching to a lower tier of model if your $$ threshold was exceeded?

gman83

Cloudflare also doesn't have any hard budget caps.

gerdesj

If you own a resource that is desired and paid for by usage then that's your income and the open market determines the money thing (price) What on earth is Simon whittering on about?

TZubiri

These already exist, it's the most standard contract imaginable.

slopinthebag

the premise seems a bit faulty to me. why should we be giving next token predictors access to spend our money? like what great benefit do we get from this that we should allow them unfettered access, but with safeguards in the form of hard budget caps?

altcognito

So weird, cause it seems a lot of services are suddenly adding them. Huh, wonder what changed?

dboreham

I'd support this provided we have the converse as well: if the customer doesn't pay their bill on time, the service gets shut down immediately. (Disclosure: I sell SaaS services to people who don't pay their bills on time).

kingcauchy

It'd be nice if more than AI spend worked this way, autoscaling is almost a mixed blessing because unpredictable pricing can be worse than the cost savings...

karmelapple

Having a monthly summary or estimate of how your spending is going would be really useful, too. Even if we have a negotiated yearly contract for $X spend per year, maybe we’ll hit that spend in 6 months instead of 12. Having some kind of automated telemetry saying how we’re trending would be so useful. I’ve gotten vague warnings from customer success people saying vaguely that, but without any warning of what’s truly happening. The more we abstract away from money (tokens, credits, etc), the more we need a way to translate right back to money, to see how close we’re getting to any limits over time. I don’t want to find out in month 5 that the contract which was expected to cover a year is now going to run out in 14 days.

biophysboy

My org has a leaderboard for AI spending each month, and I have found it interesting how fast the distribution decays, just within the top 10 users. I often think “what did these people do with all those tokens?” It’s interesting to think the answer to that question is “maybe not a lot?”