Hm, edited out snark. I think that's an easy trap to fall into, and it's good to warn against.
What I agree on (top comment): there should be laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap. Another edit: businesses and hobbyists are different beasts of course. You can't demand scaling and reliability and a hard fee cap. For traditional shared hosting, this is mostly a solved problem AFAIK.
That's what prevented me from using Firebase for a hobby project in 2023.
The only available killswitch was some weird workaround with a Google Sheets monitoring the bill and triggering an action (give or take latency) when it exceeded some amount...
ehm, no thanks.
It is a machine that optimizes profit and absolutely nothing else. It does not and cannot consider what is "good" or "right" or even "legal" unless and until one of those things directly and indisputably hurts profits too much.
This is magical thinking. "The market" is fundamentally incapable of making things better for you, the consumer.
For example, I think that OpenAI's system of incentivizing automated credit purchases borders on being predatory. Not because it would be hidden info. Just because the product is clearly aimed at consumers who do things that they might not fully understand.
For me, I don't habe any issues with their current design.
But for John Doe vibe-coding their nutrition analysis app, I feel it's wrong to advertise automatic payments and long-running tasks without providing a clear fee cap option.
It's similar to gambling.
Perhaps some kind of "we only let your bill be X% higher than the rolling average for your account" coupled with "First time you hit $10, $50, $100, $500, $1K .... firebreaks, alarms coupled with auto-stop/shutdown if you don't respond with a day or two". All of this would be available to turn off so it would just serve as a safety net.
Absolutely.
As I said on here a few days ago in a discussion about AWS finally launching hard caps ... I really don't buy the stories the US providers tell you that "its too difficult" or "what if you suddenly go viral".
The "viral" bit is easily solved through basic monitoring of metrics that everybody should be doing. I believe the cool-kids give it the fancy name of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). All you need to do is top-up your balance / adjust your cap if your metrics are trending upwards for an explainable reason. Its not rocket science. Just set a reasonable yet affordable buffer above your most ambitiously expected figures.
As for the "too difficult" that's just a lie. Its 2026. You're a cloud provider. You've got the infrastructure. You've got pre-existing APIs.
Credit card providers don't give people unlimited spending, they set a hard limit based on credit risk, I don't see why cloud providers should just let the numbers roll.
There are at least six providers in Europe I can name who offer hard caps on their services. So it is possible.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/accounts/latest/reference/sign-i...
But yes, these platforms should default to hard caps that you have to explicitly disable.