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Which clouds do this? I work quite a bit with AWS and GCP, and Azure to a lesser extent, and I've yet to see a spending limit on any of them. I'd love to be proven wrong though.



Azure definitely has subscription types that have payment limits. I have one subscription that has some credits on it, and if I go over the limits all services are suspended (i.e. compute, storage, etc) and I can't do anything unless I add more money or wait until the next period starts and the new credits kick in.

Not all Azure subscriptions types are like this though.



It's something that's frustrated me about Azure for years. They can do it, but they won't do it for pay-as-you-go accounts.

Make a SKU that's not for production with a $100 setup fee to prevent abuse and prepaid credits for consumption.


GCP has a spending limit, but it is by no means transparent[0]

Basically you add a budget to your project, create a pub/sub channel, then make a lambda that subscribes to the channel and turns off billing when it receives an overbudget message to shut everything down.

Or you could integrate it into your project directly to handle this more gracefully.

You can even send a test message, to check that everything does indeed shut down, but the whole process is extremely clunky and error-prone.

[0] - https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify


Azure gives you credits to spend. And after you have exhausted your credits, then they don't charge more.

If you have Visual Studio professional or enterprise license, then you can avail recurring credits, which are useful for learning


Yeah, but that's $45 USD per month which is an expensive way to learn and test things that would normally cost <$5. It does get you $50 per month of Azure credits though, so it's probably the route I'd go if it's possible to buy a month of Visual Studio and ignore everything but the Azure credits.


I had (have?) an Azure account through my university account and while I agree that Azure services such as Container Service are (in my not so humble opinion) ridiculously overpriced but the fact it I never entered payment details to use my USD 100 of free credit on Azure. I effectively have spending cap of zero dollars.


I thought I was the only one who thought pricing on Azure seemed rather high for what you get. But I also have free credit I can use each month, which offsets the cost to "normal" levels, but can't imagine being a business and opting to pay for Azure services by choice, unless they provide something no one else does.


I worked at mega corp and we used azure services at >50% off the sticker price

Enterprise deals can end up changing the story it seems


That would explain allot. Totally forgot big business usually gets big discounts.


Had Bizspark from microsoft which gave us access to Azure and about $300 in credits I think per service or the whole thing iirc. They shut down services once we went over that limit. This was back in 2016/2017


With azure you can set spending alerts at the very least.


GCP definitely has a spending limit. Of course it also (at least in the past) used to take 24 hours to update, so if you had a massive spike in real usage, your site would die for a day while you frantically tried to increase the limit.


Why are people saying this? It's not true. App Engine had a spending limit, but it's deprecated and going away in July. The rest of GCP has never had a spending limit.

The best you can do is build your own service to monitor your bill and manually cut off your billing account if it gets too high. Hope you did it correctly because there's no good way to test it! And the bill notifications can be delayed an arbitrary amount of time with no guarantees, and disabling billing can take an arbitrary amount of time too, so you can still be screwed even if you did it correctly.

I think it's a glaring hole in cloud platforms. I get it, it's hard to implement in a way that is forgiving and doesn't cause a bunch of support tickets from people who set their limits too low and made their site go down. But that's why people use cloud platforms, so they don't have to implement the hard part. It's beyond me why the cloud platforms don't do something better here.


Why should they if they can use obscurity and people's limited comprehension of their complicated systems to produce legitimate, legal bills to customers?

You're talking a 'get paid/don't get paid' decision here.

When you look at this on a high enough distributed level, across enough users, this is the profit margin. Enough people can screw up and then be able to pay the cloud provider, that it is part of the business model. You're required to run some chance of producing a legitimate megabill.

Why be forgiving when your business model requires that you set traps for fools?




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