Hard budget caps are now a baseline demand

The thread 'We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything' (49949235) drew a mix of relief and anger. One commenter noted that Google Cloud has finally added per-service hard caps. Another said a surprise $10k bill 'is getting off easy.' The strongest comment argued that open-ended billing shouldn't exist without a negotiated contract. A customer should be able to pay $20 a month and lose at most that.

The AWS billing-bug thread (48945241) is the comic version of the same fear. Hobby accounts that normally cost under $1 a month showed bills of $286 million, $15 billion, even $284 billion. Everyone assumed it would be reverted. One commenter admitted the scare finally pushed them to lock down old accounts. The pattern here: usage-based pricing is fine when the meter is right and you can stop it. Neither is guaranteed.

The counterpoint is that real hard caps mean the provider has to shut down your production workloads, which many companies don't want either. That's why clouds resist them.