I see there is a spending limit for the "intro" or "preview" plans designed for students, Visual Studio users, and resellers (the "hook" part in "hook, line, and sinker").

Not for actual cloud usage, like an actual pay-as-you-go plan where this would be useful.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/legal/offer-detail...

Yeah, there are trial accounts and things but as far as I know, none of the big cloud providers have a way to say "Under no circumstances are you to charge me for than $X per month even if it means shutting down services."

A lot of Chinese cloud providers like Aliyun will only allow pay and go, because there’s no way to recursively bill

My own instances go down all the time when I forget to ‘top up’ the account

Yeah I see that too I'll add that to my comment tbh I think what I said still stand it's been made hard or maybe said a different way is:

It's very easy to overspend on these big cloud providers

Oh I can't edit the comment now oh well sorry if I've confused anyone.

And the alerts are not instant, at least with Azure - they run reports every 24H or so, and execute alerts every 24H or so. So even if you're careful, you can still be on the hook for a couple of days' worth of spend - which could be very expensive.

Eh after skimming it I feel like there's still gotchas with it. Not every account can turn it on and looks like there aren't custom limit.

CMIIW, it'll be my first cloud provider if I can set one.

I dont understand why not all online metered providers are forced by law to do this.

Pretty sure fixing deeply technical business to business transparent-but-potentially-terrible pricing models are pretty far down the priority list on things that will get them re-elected right now (not even counting campaign donations).

Contract dispute cases might clarify it, but probably not in the direction any of us is hoping.