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Accident Forgiveness

fly.io

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Re: Accident Forgiveness

#21

Post by candiddevmike »

paxys wrote: post #8

It's unfortunate that the solution to cloud pricing complexity that all providers are adopting is – add even more complexity on top. The number you see on your bill is increasingly calculated by running some black box algorithm on top of the billing events your resources generate. Was it accidental or not? What is a "weird" deployment vs a normal deployment? By what factor should the spikes on your billing graph be s…

You'll pay exactly the amount they think you can afford to pay and not a penny less.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#22

Post by thenewnewguy »

paxys wrote: post #8

It's unfortunate that the solution to cloud pricing complexity that all providers are adopting is – add even more complexity on top. The number you see on your bill is increasingly calculated by running some black box algorithm on top of the billing events your resources generate. Was it accidental or not? What is a "weird" deployment vs a normal deployment? By what factor should the spikes on your billing graph be s…

I'd recommend thinking of this (and other accident forgiveness schemes from competitors) as a gesture of goodwill that rarely happens rather than an official part of the billing policy.

If you actually look at your contract, no cloud provider is going to contractually obligate themselves to forgive your bill, and you shouldn't be planning or predicting your bill based on it.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#23

Post by tptacek »

scop wrote: post #14
scop wrote: post #13

One of the things I really admire about Fly is "how human they come across". Fly is a collection of people providing a computing service to other people. As a fellow human, there is a very primitive part of my brain that will always prefer "tech from humans" over "tech". Given that the very teleology of cloud computing is digital & ephemeral resources, having an actual human face associated with it makes it tangible…

I should add that another way Fly distinguishes itself as a "tangible" cloud company is that their blog art is all based on physical mediums. It feels very familiar and quantifiable to my brain.

That's Annie Ruygt, our in-house illustrator. Check out her work; she's amazing.

https://annieruygtillustration.com/

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#26

Post by candiddevmike »

cube2222 wrote: post #19
tomjen3 wrote: post #11

I really, really wish there was just a way to put a hard limit on how much a cloud could charge me. I am never going to want to spend 200k of my personal money on some project on a cloud. Never. I don't even want my ant-based basket viewing project simulator to cost me 1 thousand dollars because it went viral and all clouds overcharge for bandwith. Just let me put in a limit.

I think this sounds easy, but it’s actually quite nontrivial in practice. You need special handling of such a limit for each kind of resource. E.g. when my limit is reached to they remove the database, along with all backups, and all objects on S3? Since storage is billed, it should also be stopped when the limit is reached, right? I think in practice among companies paying most of their revenue, there’d be zero inte…

I don't think any of these requirements are necessary. A basic "if I reach my bill limit, turn off things that are billing" toggle would suffice for 80%+ of users, especially with better billing controls/per-team billing accounts. I think you run into more problems/user frustrations with a tenuous conditional-shut-off approach.

My tinfoil hat is that a lot of cloud billing is accidental, probably from "lab environments", and they don't want to provide a way to budget/limit these.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#27

Post by joshfraser »

In other words, they are socializing the costs. Servers and electricity aren't free. Wouldn't it be better for the customer if they had no accident forgiveness and passed those cost savings along? Instead, you are paying for other peoples mistakes plus all the extra overhead caused from fraud that they incentivized.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#28

Post by tptacek »

candiddevmike wrote: post #26
cube2222 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this sounds easy, but it’s actually quite nontrivial in practice. You need special handling of such a limit for each kind of resource. E.g. when my limit is reached to they remove the database, along with all backups, and all objects on S3? Since storage is billed, it should also be stopped when the limit is reached, right? I think in practice among companies paying most of their revenue, there’d be zero inte…

I don't think any of these requirements are necessary. A basic "if I reach my bill limit, turn off things that are billing" toggle would suffice for 80%+ of users, especially with better billing controls/per-team billing accounts. I think you run into more problems/user frustrations with a tenuous conditional-shut-off approach. My tinfoil hat is that a lot of cloud billing is accidental, probably from "lab environmen…

The whole post is about this accidental billing situation.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#29

Post by osbulbul »

the biggest reason of I am not using aws, google cloud, vercel etc... for my personal projects is surprise bills. I am not earning anything from them so I can only put $50 but can't afford $500 or $5000. so still i will feel much more secure if I can put hard limit and absolutely sure my bill will never go above $50. (or cloud billing insurance :))

but you got my attention, i can try fly.io

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#30

Post by tptacek »

joshfraser wrote: post #27

In other words, they are socializing the costs. Servers and electricity aren't free. Wouldn't it be better for the customer if they had no accident forgiveness and passed those cost savings along? Instead, you are paying for other peoples mistakes plus all the extra overhead caused from fraud that they incentivized.

No, it would be worse if we "passed these cost savings along".
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