That's a great point. These cloud hosting companies don't make this a natural evolution though, because there's no human to talk to, you start tiny and increase your usage over time. But every company depending on something and paying serious money should have a specific agreement. I wonder if this could still happen though, even if you have a separate contract.

> These cloud hosting companies don't make this a natural evolution though, because there's no human to talk to

This is not true at all. Once you start spending real money on GCP or AWS, they will reach out to you. You will probably sign a support contract and have an account manager at that point. Or you might go with enterprise support where you have dedicated technical assets within the company that can help with case escalation, architecture review, billing optimization, etc.

It makes sense that would happen. So they just didn't have the contact info for the people here? Maybe they just were spending a little, but their whole business still depended on it.

Once you hit a certain spend, Google contacts you and asks you to sign a thing.

There's a mismatch between how much you spend and how much business value is there. The spend for management systems of physical infrastructure like wind turbines is tiny relative to revenue compared to the typical pure software company, especially freemium or ad-driven stuff where revenue-to-compute ratio is very low. Calibrating for this wouldn't really be in Google's DNA.

Amen to that. Once you reach 1,000 USD monthly you can switch to regular invoiced account (subjected to verification) and you have dedicated account manager.

Yeah I couldn't get my head around this bit:

> What if the card holder is on leave and is unreachable for three days? We would have lost everything — years of work — millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Indeed, presumably they were then also at the mercy of the credit card company cancelling or declining the card at the critical billing renewal moment.

I've yet to experience any subscription service that immediately shuts off access due to a declined card.

Certainly not; no reputable service provider will cut you off at the first credit card decline.

Is this possible for GCP? Definitely seems the way to go.

Yes they have invoice-based billing that you can apply for: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/invoiced-billin...

+1!