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Accident Forgiveness

fly.io

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Re: Accident Forgiveness

#171

Post by donavanm »

tptacek wrote: post #32
osbulbul wrote: post #29

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

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…

FWIW I believe your reasoning is exactly what I saw/learned at AWS. The potential cost of losing/disappointing “real” customers greatly outweighed the notional cost of lost “scared” customers.

One interesting thought was trying to model some of this as an actual insurance method. Think of the cases where an adversary of the customer might inflate their costs through 3p usage/traffic. Providers dont want to incentivize those adversaries, deny the customer service, or charge them for unuseful service. Normally it devolved to credit/forgiveness, but then that moves the customers business model risks to the provider. What if this functioned similar to an insurance model; very cheap/baked in forgiveness for everyone (as today), then based on risk profile (porn/games/polical/gambling, or previous occurrence) the customer gets the option of buying forgiveness insurance or self funding their risk. The real sticking point is around perceived/potential conflict of interest and goodwill for the provider to say “pay us more for a thing that you cant directly control.”

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#172

Post by tptacek »

Aeolun wrote: post #153
tptacek wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We talk about warnings in the post. We'll do that at some point. The hard part about caps is what to do when someone hits them. If there was a way to make caps work for our core customers, we'd do it. We're open to ideas. A theme of our work this past month and these next several months is extracting maximal value from ANFWWAONW, our new billing system. The thing you have to remember though is that our belief about o…

You are comfortable scaling a service down to zero when configured to do so though. Of course that comes up again when anyone sends a request, but that feels sort of in the same category. That said, I do understand that building your service for people like me that’d rather be restricted to just $50/month doesn’t really make sense.

I don't think anyone with a serious app running on us will use a cap. Just stay fixated on this scenario: a deploy-only token gets stolen, and the attacker (like most cloud attackers) uses it to stand up a bunch of Monero miners. As a consequence... their main app goes down? Who would be OK with that?

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#173

Post by tptacek »

reducesuffering wrote: post #138
osbulbul wrote: post #29

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

Vercel has spending caps as of about a month ago.

Vercel is pretty great.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#174

Post by tptacek »

Aeolun wrote: post #156
bdcravens wrote: post #5

To be clear, in the case of those abusing the policy: > We reserve the right to cut you off.

While obvious, doesn’t this make it the same as before?

The sentence he's referring to says that we might tell you after you've, uh, aggressively asked us to forgive a series of bills, that future accidents are no longer on the house. So no, it's not the same as before.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#176

Post by tptacek »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #141
andrewstuart wrote: post #126

Just run Linux computers on ionos with unlimited traffic and get on with the job instead of worrying about silly things like how much traffic passed over some internal software system and will it bankrupt the company. https://www.ionos.com/servers/vps

Same but on Hetzner. Incredibly beefy machines. Unlimited traffic. No fear of any sudden changes that I explicitly didn't act upon. I do not know why people fall for the shiny marketing so easily, that too hackers? Is it all the Javascript folks? Vercel I know is propped up by them for sure.

I am never going to get tired of telling people that if they can solve their problems running on Hetzner, they should do that. It's not like a dirty secret of our industry. By all means, deploy with VPSs! Or on bare metal servers!

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#177

Post by naniwaduni »

foota wrote: post #136
bitbasher wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then that company's threshold for "sensible monthly cost" would be a lot higher. 500k? 1m? Give them the option to set something.

Why would you prefer this when the alternative is no downtime and the provider forgiving the bill?

Because you don't want to be relying on the service provider's whim in "forgiving" the bill?

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#178

Post by tonymet »

It's important that all utility metering and pricing is effectively made up to balance costs across customers.

That's why residents in california probably pay 100000x / unit of water than agriculture customers do .

The same works for the cloud. An operation that costs $100000 does not cost the operator $85000 in operations on the margins.

Yes the metering and pricing schedules are necessary, but punitive pricing for accidents really is just an artifact of the system.

I'm guessing the biggest reason AWS provides forgiveness is that if anyone took them to court over a bill, a court would throw out the charge once the wholesale cost was revealed.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#179

Post by reducesuffering »

tptacek wrote: post #173
reducesuffering wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vercel has spending caps as of about a month ago.

Vercel is pretty great.

There are so many Next.js apps. Please make sure the Next.js deployment on Fly.io is smooth as you'll inevitably get a huge exodus (including me) if/when too many people pay high prices on Vercel.

Proxy for popularity: https://trends.stackoverflow.co/?tags=elixir,next.js,django,...

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#180

Post by tptacek »

reducesuffering wrote: post #179
tptacek wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vercel is pretty great.

There are so many Next.js apps. Please make sure the Next.js deployment on Fly.io is smooth as you'll inevitably get a huge exodus (including me) if/when too many people pay high prices on Vercel. Proxy for popularity: https://trends.stackoverflow.co/?tags=elixir,next.js,django,...

We're not looking to pull people from Vercel. I'm not kidding, I like Vercel a lot.
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