I just wanted to say I first heard of Fly.io from "The Changelog" podcast
Accident Forgiveness
41–50 of 310 posts
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#42the 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
Except for things like student accounts, which we're working on, I don't think hard limits are coming any time soon. Our expectation is that the enforcement of hard billing limits would mostly make customers furious with us. If you read to the end of the post, the direction we're going is preemptive detection of weird billing spikes, so you don't even have to notice and ask us. If you're really only looking to spend…
yeah I am pretty sure no cloud provider thinks people who can willing to spend small money. but guess what? if one of my projects start earning money, then I will continue to what I know best :) I think that's why every cloud provider still has configs for couple of $
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#43There is a very obvious fix for surprise billing. Enforce a billing cap and terminate service if it's met. Even better if you send alerts when the cap is approaching. If I pay $39/month, a default cap should be $39 per-month. Otherwise, let me set a cap I am comfortable with. Surprise billing is never good for customers, only the business.
I promise, you are not the first person to have thought of this, and, believe it or not, there are reasons other than malice and avarice that cloud providers don't terminate service based on billing caps. Terminating service is a big deal.
We agree completely about surprise billing.
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#44It'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.
That would be what you would pay in the absence of competition. This is an incredibly competitive space.
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#45There is a very obvious fix for surprise billing. Enforce a billing cap and terminate service if it's met. Even better if you send alerts when the cap is approaching. If I pay $39/month, a default cap should be $39 per-month. Otherwise, let me set a cap I am comfortable with. Surprise billing is never good for customers, only the business.
I promise, you are not the first person to have thought of this, and, believe it or not, there are reasons other than malice and avarice that cloud providers don't terminate service based on billing caps. Terminating service is a big deal. We agree completely about surprise billing.
The only thing in cloud that's worse than a surprise bill is a surprise outage.
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for things like student accounts, which we're working on, I don't think hard limits are coming any time soon. Our expectation is that the enforcement of hard billing limits would mostly make customers furious with us. If you read to the end of the post, the direction we're going is preemptive detection of weird billing spikes, so you don't even have to notice and ask us. If you're really only looking to spend…
yeah I am pretty sure no cloud provider thinks people who can willing to spend small money. but guess what? if one of my projects start earning money, then I will continue to what I know best :) I think that's why every cloud provider still has configs for couple of $
We think all the time about people starting small projects here. I think a really good line to draw, if you want to understand how we think about this stuff, is between people who would be OK with us terminating their service because they mispredicted what their cap should be, and people who need their stuff to stay up and running and will just talk to support if they're concerned about billing. A shorter way to say this is that we making product pricing decisions for people who are doing this work professionally.
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#47New startup idea: Pool unused "accident" credits, automate the forgiveness request, and sell it to the highest bidder.
I believe that's called a reserved instance.
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
You'll pay exactly the amount they think you can afford to pay and not a penny less.
That would be what you would pay in the absence of competition. This is an incredibly competitive space.
Competition only matters for new contracts. Once you have picked a provider and made a big enough infrastructure investment, there's no realistic path to switch to someone else.
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I promise, you are not the first person to have thought of this, and, believe it or not, there are reasons other than malice and avarice that cloud providers don't terminate service based on billing caps. Terminating service is a big deal. We agree completely about surprise billing.
The only thing in cloud that's worse than a surprise bill is a surprise outage.
Depends. For my hobby project that hasn't been monetized, being charged $100k is way worse than it going down.
If it were critical infrastructure, or monetized in a way that brought in revenue to cover the charge, then maybe I don't want it to shut down despite skyrocketing costs, but that's hardly the only situation you could be in.
Re: Accident Forgiveness
#50There is a very obvious fix for surprise billing. Enforce a billing cap and terminate service if it's met. Even better if you send alerts when the cap is approaching. If I pay $39/month, a default cap should be $39 per-month. Otherwise, let me set a cap I am comfortable with. Surprise billing is never good for customers, only the business.
I promise, you are not the first person to have thought of this, and, believe it or not, there are reasons other than malice and avarice that cloud providers don't terminate service based on billing caps. Terminating service is a big deal. We agree completely about surprise billing.
Having flashbacks to the time where we had paid for a server and were paying for rack space for a customer and they were refusing to pay their bill. Our lawyers told us in no uncertain terms that turning off the server would be a terrible idea. “Obstruction of service” is the term that comes to mind.