Let’s make a thought experiment.
CEO of Cloudflare introduces hard billing caps at a _business_ (not technical) level. Your organization will never be billed more than the level you set. Your app may stop, or may continue running, but above the monthly cap it’s free for you, it becomes Cloudflare’s expense if they didn’t pause the services.
I guarantee you that in this case, all technical issues you’re talking about would be solved in three weeks, and your service would go down within 3 seconds after hitting the cap.
If CEO decision were that any over-usage above the cap is deducted from employee bonuses from the specific product division that didn’t stop spending in time — all technical challenges would be solved in 48 hours.
Currently, there are literally zero organizational incentives for CloudFlare to develop any usage caps
All technical problems are like that. You throw labor hours and hardware at them and progress is made. The question is, how much does it take, and is it worth that much? Which in turn depends on how willing you are to patronize someone else if they don't.
Exactly. There's little "win" here for the business, especially when the simpler "just cap at n requests" solution exists. Pursuing this solution:
- introduces more technical complexity (increased cost of developing, testing and maintentance)
- forces overage costs onto the vendor, who will then... increase prices to cover these costs, which upsets customers and makes the company less competitive.
- doesn't improve cost prediction (since n requests can be costed out a $/request quite easily and reliably)
(The cynical will say something about "the business has an incentive to _not_ fix this issue because they get paid for overages", but this assumes that Cloudflare has the, "monopolistic" market power to make customers unhappy and still charge whatever they want. In this case implementing billing caps wouldn't do anything because Cloudflare could just... charge whatever they want.)
Suppose it would cost them X million dollars a year to provide the feature and providing it would cost them nothing in terms of sales, and indeed get them a few more because people like the feature. Well, it still costs them that amount to provide it, so then the question is whether X is less than Y. But you don't control how much it costs them to implement it, only how much of your business you're going to take somewhere else without it, and if nobody is willing to do that then why would you expect them to spend the money?
It doesn't have to be that they're purposely screwing you. It's just that if you don't care enough to choose differently then why would they?
> Suppose it would cost them X million dollars a year to provide the feature and providing it would cost them nothing in terms of sales, and indeed get them a few more because people like the feature. Well, it still costs them that amount to provide it, so then the question is whether X is less than Y.
lol, that is the cynical option!
It's just "we profit more by charging people for overages than we would if we put in a price cap", with more words!
It's the same as making a subscription people can enroll in online, but cancelling it requires going to the HQ in person, or writing a registered mail demand letter, etc.
After all, why build a way to cancel online subscriptions online if X is more than Y? Maybe it's more profitable to keep charging people for something they don't want.
"The cynical option" is any option which consistently puts pure profitability ahead of doing the right thing by customers, society, or human decency in general, and that is precisely the Cloudflare decision criteria we're discussing.
1) They don't build it because they purposely want to screw customers with overage charges.
2) They don't build it because building it costs money and the customer demand (i.e. willingness to switch) over that feature isn't sufficient to justify the expense.
The first one is way more cynical than the second one.
The second one is what everyone here is talking about, and it is the cynical option, compared to doing the right thing every once in a while, even if it doesn't earn profits.
It is a very solvable problem, I just don't think pre- vs postpaid changes it.
Capping it at 100K requests is a lot easier, because it's a single number that can be incremented easily in a distributed way.
It's the same reason it took AWS forever to offer billing caps, and even today, they label it as best effort. They don't guarantee you won't pay more than your set limit.