The equivalent 10+ years earlier was so much lower risk: £25 or so for an old computer at a junk sale, £4.99 for a magazine with a Linux CD-ROM to avoid a week-long download.

> strict budget

How does that work in the case of AWS? Are you confusing alerts to caps?

I meant a strict budget given by my parents (and I could ask for more with justification). One of the valuable lessons I have learned is that there's no spending caps on AWS, but it taught me to set up billing alerts :)

the billing alerts DO NOT help. you may rack many thousands of $$$ before you know it.

You haven’t addressed the issue though? That or you don’t understand the issue (or think you have developed some super powers that make you perfect careful)

Some variant of this topic comes up with some regularity. Leaving aside technical issues associated with implementing real-time hard caps, you still have a tradeoff. You either implement hard cutoffs which a student or someone else on a hard budget would like. Or you have a situation where an admin (or an admin who is no longer with a company) stuck some number in that seemed sensible at the time that brings down the company's whole system because of some sales spike.

I get that (and why) some people won't use AWS or its main competitors for this reason. But, frankly, they're not AWS's market and AWS will basically shrug.

A possibility is to have KYC. I don't mean like a bank, but if you could sort your customers into a few broad categories (such as by asking them) that could help you tailor your service to each customer.

You don't have to use AWS though. Get one from Digital Ocean or Herzner, they have very predictable billing. Any button that costs money will tell you how much it costs per month.