This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_.

My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it which makes the cap fairly useless.

Some of these services are billed by such small increments I can't even imagine how complex billing for them is in practice. I'd be surprised if bills are eventually consistent within 24 hours.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement like billing being guaranteed after 1 hour at some point in the not too distant future, but I'd be surprised if we see realtime caps.

I’m on the Bill Computation Team for AWS, and this is exactly it. The work behind the scenes is insane. BillComp is the oldest and most brittle part of AWS. There are modernization efforts underway, so stay tuned.

Trust me, they hear you.

> This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_.

Or maybe it is a costly implementation that would not bring any profits.

The strange thing is that the lack of this feature seems too incur a cost as it causes more calls to customer support. So, maybe it's that implement this feature will reduce profit more that it will reduce cost.

When I fill my tank with gas, there's a preauthorization with my credit card before I'm allowed to pump a single drop. It seems like a similar arrangement could be made here w/r to hourly level billing. And it would be a huge improvement over the current situation which scares me away.

Oddly enough, Budgets seem to work, since I've gotten alerted to runaway services fast enough (I set it at 80% of my previously-free monthly AWS credits) to be able to log in and fix them, or shut them down.