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Ask HN: Why can't cloud providers offer a prepay option?

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11–19 of 19 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why can't cloud providers offer a prepay option?

#11
It's a lot of trouble and ultimately they lose money on the changes. Right now if someone goes over whatever limit they set for themselves they mostly pay the chargers or on the rare cases they try to dispute them. With a set limits the provider will always lose business. Also trying to make sure the limits are not met is extra CPU power that could otherwise be sold for a profit. Bottom line, it does not make business sense .

It doesn't even make sense as a competitive advantage since it costs more to maintain than what it brings in. If I owned the cloud service I would only set the capability if the customers demanded it to the point of them switching to a competitor en masse.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't cloud providers offer a prepay option?

#12

Why not skip all of that and work on/with web3 technologies instead?

Working with centralized technologies is much easier than working with the blockchain. Additionally, web3 is not very advanced for its costs. Needing to pay money (even a fraction of a cent) to do basically anything is not a compelling model, especially considering that most of the “fast” blockchains still take a couple of seconds to do anything.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't cloud providers offer a prepay option?

#14

Why not skip all of that and work on/with web3 technologies instead?

Working with centralized technologies is much easier than working with the blockchain. Additionally, web3 is not very advanced for its costs. Needing to pay money (even a fraction of a cent) to do basically anything is not a compelling model, especially considering that most of the “fast” blockchains still take a couple of seconds to do anything.

Aren't you paying for each service/resource/action with a cloud provider

Re: Ask HN: Why can't cloud providers offer a prepay option?

#15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working with centralized technologies is much easier than working with the blockchain. Additionally, web3 is not very advanced for its costs. Needing to pay money (even a fraction of a cent) to do basically anything is not a compelling model, especially considering that most of the “fast” blockchains still take a couple of seconds to do anything.

Aren't you paying for each service/resource/action with a cloud provider

I definitely phrased my original comment wrong. Cloud providers do charge for basically everything. However, the charges are much smaller that fees on most blockchains. ETH gas fees are a good example of what I mean, although they are absurdly high compared to other blockchains.

Re: Ask HN: Why can't cloud providers offer a prepay option?

#18
Is there a specific reason you're tied to Azure (or any of the other 'big' providers)?

I do all my spin-up/spin-down testing at Digital Ocean, Vultr, or Hetzner ... even if I happen to forget something's up and running, it's never more than ~$5-10 in a month (and I get the billing statement every month, so I can quickly nix stuff if I did happen to forget about it)

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