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Nathanba | 3 days ago

let's hope it happens soon, I'm pretty sick of this reality where companies get to charge you whatever they want and it's designed to always be your fault

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AnthonyMouse|3 days ago

You're configuring something that costs money (electricity, hardware, real estate) to provide. Either it's "pay as you go" or you have a flat rate and a cap.

If you have a cap and then your thing hits the front page and suddenly has 10000% more legitimate traffic than usual, and you want the legitimate traffic, they're going to get an error page instead of what you want. If there is no cap, you're going to get a large bill. People hate both of those things and will complain regardless of which one actually happens.

The main thing Google is screwing up here is not giving you the choice between them.

StopDisinfo910|3 days ago

The main thing Google is screwing up is that if my API key somehow leaks and I end up with extremely out of line billing at Microsoft, I will be on the phone with a customer representative as soon as we or they notice something weird happening and a solution will be found.

Google will probably have me go through five bots and if, by some kind of miracle, I manage to have a human on the phone, they will probably explain to me that I should have read the third paragraph of the fourth page of the self service doc and it's obviously my fault.

influx|3 days ago

Imagine the outrage here, when a company credit card expires and the cloud provider terminates all their instances, deletes all your storage and blob backups?

Nathanba|3 days ago

it's not an either or, they can easily let me configure any kind of behavior that I want. No cap, a hard cap, a soft cap, a cap that I program with a python script, a cap where I throttle, a cap where I opt in to deleting certain machines to save money. It can all be done. People are complaining because obvious features are not provided. People would not be complaining if they had all the options that we needed to control how to scale resources in response to load, not just technical load but also financial load.

Eddy_Viscosity2|3 days ago

> I'm pretty sick of this reality where companies get to charge you whatever they want and it's designed to always be your fault

But have you considered it from the companies POV? Charging whatever you like and its always the customers fault is a pretty sweet deal. Up next in the innovation pipeline is charging customers extra fees for something or other. It'll be great!

shimman|3 days ago

Why should I care about the companies POV? The company always wants to rat fuck everyone to make money. The company should be legally compelled to care about the customer because that's the only way these things change.

SoftTalker|3 days ago

This is just the utility model. It's nothing particularly nefarious. Consider what your electric utility, your water utility, etc. do. If you use more, you pay more. If someone comes around and hooks up a garden hose to your outside faucet and steals your water, or plugs an extension cord into your outside outlet and steals your electricity, you still pay. Unless you can catch the thief and make him pay.

cwmoore|3 days ago

Healthy, even.