Both AWS and Google offer free tier products and pay-for-what-you-use products. Reserved instance pricing starts at around $25/year. Many other incredibly useful products (S3, Lambda, VPC, etc.) are free with an instance or start at $0.

You can set billing alerts that will project your monthly budget every hour, and send you an alert when it's projected to be exceeded.

IMHO your claim (that there is an entry cost barrier) is the opposite of reality. AWS and Google have brought incredible power and choice to developers starting at zero initial cost.

My main concern is, that i can't define an upper limit. My billing alert is nice and im aware of it, but it doesn't help you if someone takes over your account, mines bitcoins on expensive machines and a day later you read your email.

AWS refunds you when that happens.

The fundamental issue with setting a limit is it's technically infeasible to decide what to do when it's exceeded. They have no way of knowing what assets to terminate. The way to avoid what you describe is to shut off access to APIs that you don't want to use, and keep your credentials safe.

AWS has budgets that do exactly what you want. For the "cost budget": "Monitor your costs against a specified dollar amount and receive alerts when your user-defined thresholds are met."

If I’m running a startup trying to develop a product with limited staff, the last thing I want to be worried about is the “undifferentiated heavy lifting”. I want to be concentrating on what is going to add business value.

Then again, I know enough about AWS and how to control my cost.

> you loose all the self healing stuff and loadbalancing capability.

I mean, yes? You can either build your own for “free”, or pay for the value-add features DO provides that you have described. I don’t see where the problem is.

Good point about GKE blocking resources on the nodes. I wish they would at least allow more control over that with the introduction of the master fees.