Cloud Billing Caps

I've used NearlyFreeSpeech for years (as registrar & DNS), and I've loved their service. Their site is plain, and you just trade money for a plain, simple product, with basically 0 bullshit between you and that exchange. Their site is so refreshing in today's landscape of upsells and other corporate dark patterns.The article implicates AWS, but AFAICT the other major cloud, GCP, behaves similarly. The docs for "budget alerts"[1] do call it out directly,>

Can’t you set spending limits on AWS which should solve this? What other services have better functionality to avoid blowing up spend?

Are there cloud services that allow to easily put a maximum budget, to make sure you have no surprise costs like that?

I really wish cloud providers would allow users to set a hard budget that just stops the service if you exceed a threshold. I got a surprise bill from AWS this month (fortunately orders of magnitude less than this, but still ~15x my usual) and am thinking of moving from Lambda to a VPS just so the possibility of this doesn't keep me up at night.

Your product doesn't help this situation at all. The problem is people want capped spending for unimportant projects (just cut off service rather than accruing charges), which can only be done by AWS. You're just providing reporting assuming no additional charges.

This is the nightmare scenario with a personal AWS account. AWS billing setup makes it impossible to know that there is a giant bill until after the fact. I wish there was some way to limit the bill and just have everything shut down at that point for hobby projects.

For me the main problem is that there is no bill capping in AWS - if the bill exceeds, say, $100, just shut down all my services no matter what. As a poor hobbyist dev I just cannot bear the risk of an unexpected high bill, although the chance of that is very slim.

Does AWS implement spending limits? I would think that would be sufficient, if not, at least a start.

I really wish AWS would allow users to cap billing. Something that freezes all AWS services if the monthly bill exceeds X would make me a lot more comfortable when experimenting with AWS.

If there's ever been a case against using GCP or AWS this is it. You better understand those systems or you will be in for the shock of your life when you get hit with this sort of crazy billing. I got $3,000 AWS credit and was terrified of running experiments in case I made a mistake. It should not be hard to set hard billing limits, these companies know how to set hard CPU limits, why can't they do that with billing?