Cost is not only based on the number of instances. From a quick search:

https://www.jhanley.com/google-cloud-run-pricing/

Understanding the cost of these services is not easy at all, especially for extreme cases/situations. And a calculator/estimator won't fix the problem. That is why I love the fixed $X/month where there's no room for surprises.

I hope GCP/AWS add a max spend ability. Until then it's complexity of pricing model vs time spent on OS and database management. To each their own.

It's why I'm on digital ocean. Cheap, but good quality service that's comparable to the big boys and it's capped. $5/month is perfect for me

I use DO too, but they have deleted a lot of customer data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225665

https://blog.checklyhq.com/why-the-recent-digital-ocean-kill...

Keep your stuff backed up.

I use Heroku for these situations where everything is managed automatically. The only con here would be paying more, $20-50/m (Node.js+DB+Redis?) instead of $5/m for DO, but I'm happy to pay for that and spend no time on manual management.

You can definitely set limits on GCP

The trouble with this is what do you do when your "max spend" is reached? Shut everything down? Shut parts of it down? Most "real world" systems aren't built to have the stool kicked from underneath them like that, so there will be data/business loss and pissed off customers (and in the case of Cloud also pissed off customers' customers).

The conversation was about side-projects where it's better to have it shut down than drain the owner's checking account. The alternative being an overloaded web server that becomes unavailable.