That these were so scary shows the downside of usage-based fees. If you run on dedicated hardware, you always know what you'll have to pay, no matter how you utilize the system.

The risk of surprise bills, even with the advantage of higher scalability, is one of the major factors to put me off many cloud services. I wouldn't want to run a business where you always have the risk of some bug or unforeseen behavior destroying your budget.

I've said this over and over again. There should be laws in place enabling a person or company to set a hard limit on spend.

It would be a pro-innovation law because people would then have the confidence to innovate.

I also think it'd be good for companies. If you usually pay (say, numbers don't matter, except that AWS or whoever doesn't care until they get bigger I suppose) 1k-3k and set a 'don't surprise me too much' limit of 5k, then when something unexpected happens, instead of having a bad time pleading with them to let you off 12k or whatever and feeling cautious about using it again perhaps with some sour taste even if they do let you off, you think 'woah, glad I have the limit', and pretty much get on with your day; AWS or whoever gets an unexpected 2-4k instead of writing off 9-11k, and keeps the happy customer (at the customer's expense instead of its own).

I agree, unless... It could be that they're making most of their money from spikes. It would be interesting if that were the case.

I don't think so, surely most comes from far bigger fish than the type to have (not have time/resources to avoid) spikes and care about them.

I agree cloud providers shouldn't be able to bankrupt their users due to high usage. IMO it should be mandatory to set a limit it makes sense from a finance side.

In my case my cards don't have $12 million of a limit so they could not actually charge me that amount of money. It makes sense if you use invoice type billing i.e. like a company but as an individual these insane bills can't actually run.

they wouldn't be able to charge your CC but this isn't really relevant to what you owe them

they can still attempt to come after you for that $12 million

Of course but I cannot ever pay that amount so what would be the point from their side. It would be more sensible to stop after they run out of money on my CC.

These emails we got were about billing limit (which is meant to be a hard limit on github) being hit too. Either the bug ignored such limits (ours was in the low thousands) or it created charges so fast that the limit couldn't apply anymore.

You didn't read the blog post from GitHub saying they were switching to Zimbabwean dollars because the dollar is falling out of favor as the reserve currency?

Damn.

Well, when you owe $10,000 it's your problem, when you owe $10,000,000 it's their problem :D

I think this code wasn’t supposed to go into effect until Microsoft moves beyond their friendly stage and moves into maximum revenue extract stage.

yeah, better than coffee ;) ... we had $78,610,108

Our account is still showing $188,536,934.07 overage.

The amount was so ridiculous that it didn't replace coffee for me. :-)

Anyway, it's already fixed for our account.