AWS bill capping feature request thread still unanswered after 10 years

I believe GCP currently has the best feature for this. You can set both billing alerts as well as caps. However, I also believe that it can take up to 24 hours between incurring a cost and it showing up on your billing report. So even on GCP (which is the most forward-thinking cloud service for this feature), you can incur up to 24 hours of charges over your maximum billing threshold cutoff. I'm also not 100% sure if GCP's billing threshold is really designed to be a "hard cap" per se.

The real question is whether AWS should let perfect be the enemy of good; and/or whether providing a somewhat "broken" service like GCP's would mislead customers into feeling more protected than they actually are.

See here where someone set a Firebase billing budget of $7 but an infinite recursion generated $72,000 in charges. When the founders started seeing the charges come in, all they could do was watch as it grew and grew....because their screen was merely reflecting what had already happened in hours past.

https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/google_cloud_over_run...

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25398148

So you hit your limit. Is all your storage deleted? You can't receive an alert because that costs something (even if it's a fraction of a cent) to send. Are your domains forfeit? Audit logs destroyed? There's no reasonable way to implement this. Billing alerts are the best you can do on this problem and I think it would be a good faith move for AWS to enable some by default but a limit just doesn't make sense on any level.

EDIT: Lots of people proposing solutions that work for them. AWS has to think of everyone. And they did. That's why budget alerts exist and you can respond in the way you choose. Everyone's conflicting ideas for how to solve this can be implemented today on top of billing alerts/actions[1]. Case closed.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws-cost-management/get-started...

Think about the details... if you are paying something for both storage and bandwidth, and get a sudden surge of bandwidth, do you really want items in storage to be deleted? You basically never want storage to be automatically deleted even if your program suddenly uses a surprising amount; limits on its maximum size and alerts are much better.

But once you realize that bill capping doesn't make sense for storage, well, many different services are essentially some type of storage. This is a feature that sounds good but in practice what people really need is something slightly different.