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Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#141

Post by __natty__ »

simonw wrote: post #47

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps. I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s. The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://develo…

I wonder why they didn’t introduce this yet. Same anbout other cloud providers. It’s not that this is some rocket science technology to achieve because they calculate near realtime usage anyway. Can this be because they earn more on people going beyond what they would set limit?

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#142

Post by [deleted] »

__natty__ wrote: post #141
simonw wrote: post #47

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps. I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s. The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://develo…

I wonder why they didn’t introduce this yet. Same anbout other cloud providers. It’s not that this is some rocket science technology to achieve because they calculate near realtime usage anyway. Can this be because they earn more on people going beyond what they would set limit?

[deleted]

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#143

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #127
nlitened wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very sure what you’re saying is not true. It’s a viable-looking technical excuse, but you can easily understand that it’s false. Let’s make a thought experiment. CEO of Cloudflare introduces hard billing caps at a _business_ (not technical) level. Your organization will never be billed more than the level you set. Your app may stop, or may continue running, but above the monthly cap it’s free for you, it becomes…

You're describing a way to get the technical people to do the work, but that was never the problem. If you want them to do it you just tell them to, and then they spend however many hours doing it, instead of doing something else. All technical problems are like that. You throw labor hours and hardware at them and progress is made. The question is, how much does it take, and is it worth that much? Which in turn depen…

Isn't that the point OP made, only repeated?: The price cap functionality which customers want, is missing, not for lack of feasibility or capability (as was previously claimed above), but because the company makes more money overcharging customers, and thus doesn't want to fix the problem.

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#144

Post by weird-eye-issue »

simonw wrote: post #24

Hot damn... > Any agent can now run wrangler deploy --temporary and deploy a Worker to Cloudflare. This temporary deployment stays live for 60 minutes, during which time you can claim the temporary account, making it permanently your own. If you don't, it expires on its own. Forget about agents, Cloudflare just provided free scratch deployments - ephemeral for 60 minutes - for anyone . This is going to be amazing for…

Cloudflare Workers already support preview urls, and if you set up Github integration they are done automatically

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#145

Post by weird-eye-issue »

827a wrote: post #11

Correct me if I'm wrong, but does Cloudflare still not have a "Create Account" button on the account listing page? I think you still have to sign up from scratch doing plus-code email tricks, then invite your original email address as an admin, juggling multiple accounts. They should consider fixing that first.

Oh actually it's worse now, they blocked email addresses with + in them!

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#146

Post by mentat »

nlitened wrote: post #123
jedberg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've dealt with this before. The problem with doing a billing cap is that now you are bringing an out-of-band batch system (billing) in-band. The only way to do a dollar cap is to constantly calculate your bill. Capping it at 100K requests is a lot easier, because it's a single number that can be incremented easily in a distributed way. It's the same reason it took AWS forever to offer billing caps, and even today, t…

I am very sure what you’re saying is not true. It’s a viable-looking technical excuse, but you can easily understand that it’s false. Let’s make a thought experiment. CEO of Cloudflare introduces hard billing caps at a _business_ (not technical) level. Your organization will never be billed more than the level you set. Your app may stop, or may continue running, but above the monthly cap it’s free for you, it becomes…

You’re very sure because you’ve built one at scale? This is such peak HN. And you have plenty of other people who have never built a billing system at scale to agree with you. The OP is right, this is in fact very very hard for the reasons they say.

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#147

Post by weird-eye-issue »

piterrro wrote: post #57
kentonv wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it only makes sense to deploy small things there What makes you say that?

I’m running entire leadjobs.dev on cloudflare workers and its kind of unreliable for the traffic it gets - around 100 visitors/day. There are some weird errors in d1 from time to time which i cannot debug since its all black box. Also latencies are greater than I would expect, especially, again for d1. Overall its great value for money to get a globally available, low latency service - but I would think twice before…

Don't use D1. They make it sound like with read replication it's going to be fast everywhere but if you actually test it that's just a complete lie and in almost all cases you are better off using a central database with something like Supabase or if the data is smaller and per user then Durable Objects

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#148

Post by devdoshi »

simonw wrote: post #47

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps. I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s. The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://develo…

If it weren't implemented by cloudflare natively, would you be ok using a library or something that wraps or hooks onto your IaC to wrap entry points with a worker (proxy or circuit-breaker, conceptually) with various types of limits (real-time estimated spend, or just counts of operations, or just a on/off switch wired to an email alert). I'm pulling a few of these threads at the moment since I've been ramping up my cloudflare usage.

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#149

Post by jt2190 »

nlitened wrote: post #128
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're describing a way to get the technical people to do the work, but that was never the problem. If you want them to do it you just tell them to, and then they spend however many hours doing it, instead of doing something else. All technical problems are like that. You throw labor hours and hardware at them and progress is made. The question is, how much does it take, and is it worth that much? Which in turn depen…

That’s kinda my point. We don’t have usage caps not because they are technically hard or impossible to implement (they’re not). It’s because the leadership thinks (likely correctly) that implementing them would just hurt company’s bottom line.

> [L]eadership thinks (likely correctly) that implementing them would just hurt company’s bottom line.

Exactly. There's little "win" here for the business, especially when the simpler "just cap at n requests" solution exists. Pursuing this solution:

- introduces more technical complexity (increased cost of developing, testing and maintentance)

- forces overage costs onto the vendor, who will then... increase prices to cover these costs, which upsets customers and makes the company less competitive.

- doesn't improve cost prediction (since n requests can be costed out a $/request quite easily and reliably)

(The cynical will say something about "the business has an incentive to _not_ fix this issue because they get paid for overages", but this assumes that Cloudflare has the, "monopolistic" market power to make customers unhappy and still charge whatever they want. In this case implementing billing caps wouldn't do anything because Cloudflare could just... charge whatever they want.)

Re: Temporary Cloudflare accounts for AI agents

#150

Post by tracerbulletx »

simonw wrote: post #47

Looks like Cloudflare still haven't shipped the most valuable possible feature for Cloudflare Workers though: hard billing caps. I want to set a cap of $100/month and know, for sure, that if something untoward happens my apps will all stop serving traffic rather than me getting hit with a bill for $1000s. The safest way to use Workers is on the free tier, which will shut off after 100,000 requests/day: https://develo…

It's not valuable for them to have this, and not because they want to skim big bills off of little guys. It's because customers small enough to care about this are not only not worth the investment in the feature, even having them on the platform is nearly a net negative.
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