Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Accident Forgiveness

fly.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 310 posts

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#161

Post by sanbor »

ilaksh wrote: post #112
tptacek wrote: post #32

Earlier 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…

I love your service, but this erroneous take makes me think that even if I was looking to spend up to $500 with a "real" business, you don't have me in mind. There should obviously be multiple types of caps. AWS and others have set a precedent that they can get away with "gotchas" for anyone who isn't paying attention. It's really the primary business model. People that aren't watching costs have more and more sneak…

Vercel has spend management and an option to pause pro when reaching the spend amount https://vercel.com/docs/pricing/spend-management#pausing-pro...

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#162

Post by Aeolun »

bee_rider wrote: post #119
tptacek wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but bear in mind that across the entire industry of public clouds, which has been around for something like 2 decades now, nobody really has this feature. In fact, didn't Google have this feature and then pull it?

Yes, clearly is it not the convention to provide this feature. But the chain of thought seems so straightforward and obvious to me: cloud infrastructure is great for exploring what you’ll be doing, and guardrails make you more willing to explore fearlessly. I’m obviously missing something, though!

It’s also easy to see why the convention would be to not have it. It earns the provider more money. After all, not every customer will ask for forgiveness for a surprise bill.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#163

Post by Aeolun »

School-Cotton wrote: post #146
Aeolun wrote: post #140

> may only come within tens of dollars of accurately predicting your water bill Uh, what is the magnitude of these water bills? I’m fairly certain I can predict it to within a few dollars because it’s only $35 in the first place.

I have absolutely no idea how much I pay for water, but vaguely think it’s probably between 0 and 100. Why does knowing it’s small mean you can predict it precisely, in a world where auto-payment exists so you never have to actually look at your bills?

I mean that it’d be extremely unlikely for me to not be able to predict my water bill to within ‘tens of dollars’, because that is the entire amount.

Also, I get receipts by postal mail even if I auto pay them, so I guess that makes it easier.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#165

Post by donavanm »

gwbas1c wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One thing I'm really curious about is why caps are so hard? (Perhaps this would result in a more technical blog post?) IE, you clearly don't want to terminate or shut down an account if they get too close to a cap. But what about things like a warning email, service slowdown, ect? Likewise, the old "slashdotted" or "hug of death" might be an appropriate result when something goes beyond a reasonable safety buffer? An…

Metering, pricing, and billing is way more complicated than you might assume. There are historical posts here with more details if you search. In short its all async, theres variable lag, theres multiple “types” or dimensions to metering, the prices vary by SKU + customer + previous metering or billing value + other SKU usage, and billing is not uniform across customers. Imagine needing to accumulate all the metering events, apply pricing plans, modify price based on accumulated value, then periodically recalculate it all to compute a bill, then apply more transforms and credits, and that gets to the billable price.

Now evaluate your “cap” rules (which will be just as complex) and feed that back to the actual admin/control plane of the service.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#166

Post by tptacek »

tedunangst wrote: post #127
tptacek wrote: post #71

Y'all really, really want caps. We think that's a crazy feature. We don't want to do it. But I just had this conversation on a Slack with a bunch of friends at other companies and they were just as yell-y about this. There's a threshold of feedback at which I think you could get us to do some kind of cap thingo. I'm just saying. Yeesh.

Okay, so now that it's inevitable you add caps, can we wager on how long between rollout and the first front page "I told fly I wanted a service cap, but not like this!" post?

I think I know how to message this one. "You fuckers, here you go, now leave me alone".

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#167

Post by jiveturkey »

tmnvix wrote: post #121
tptacek wrote: post #43

Earlier 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.

My preferred option would be to have an optional billing cap that I can enable knowing full well that if it is exceeded the service would be terminated (obviously with notifications as that cap is approached). I could then apply this to simple hobby projects and such, while not having the risk of termination apply to more serious applications (though a 'soft cap' would be nice here so that I could still receive notif…

As a certain kind of user, you probably do think that. But I also think I should be able to have a root level admin account without MFA. The consensus is that no, that should not be up to the customer.

It's different here, sure, but the providers optimize for not letting customers shoot themselves in the foot, and remediation via bill forgiveness is a fine solution -- from the provider POV.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#168

Post by tptacek »

School-Cotton wrote: post #148
tptacek wrote: post #71

Y'all really, really want caps. We think that's a crazy feature. We don't want to do it. But I just had this conversation on a Slack with a bunch of friends at other companies and they were just as yell-y about this. There's a threshold of feedback at which I think you could get us to do some kind of cap thingo. I'm just saying. Yeesh.

Why don’t you want to do caps?

When I was 15 years old, I was walking the mean streets of Chicago after attending an opera with my parents when a billing cap leapt from the alley and snatched my mom's purse. My dad fought it valiantly, but it prevailed, killing both my parents in the process. From that day forward...

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#169

Post by tptacek »

Aeolun wrote: post #162
bee_rider wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, clearly is it not the convention to provide this feature. But the chain of thought seems so straightforward and obvious to me: cloud infrastructure is great for exploring what you’ll be doing, and guardrails make you more willing to explore fearlessly. I’m obviously missing something, though!

It’s also easy to see why the convention would be to not have it. It earns the provider more money. After all, not every customer will ask for forgiveness for a surprise bill.

This is not why we don't have caps. Maybe it's why AWS doesn't. This simply isn't how we make our money. Our top line is dominated by companies growing businesses with us. Getting a hobbyist to cough up an extra $100 doesn't move a single dial for us.

Re: Accident Forgiveness

#170

Post by Aeolun »

tptacek wrote: post #169
Aeolun wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also easy to see why the convention would be to not have it. It earns the provider more money. After all, not every customer will ask for forgiveness for a surprise bill.

This is not why we don't have caps. Maybe it's why AWS doesn't. This simply isn't how we make our money. Our top line is dominated by companies growing businesses with us. Getting a hobbyist to cough up an extra $100 doesn't move a single dial for us.

I didn’t mean to imply you did (or even AWS for that matter). Just that from the consumers perspective it’s impossible to see/know the difference.
Post reply on HN