Over on Reddit someone got stuck with a 450k one.
Struggling to find the third thread again though. Maybe they deleted it
Also seeing an uptick in people suggesting insurance as the solution. Which seems insane to me but what do I know
Are you buying insurance against having a successful business? No one is going to sell that. Are you buying insurance against being hacked? That makes sense and does exist, but only solves one very specific version of this and isn't really about cloud billing, plus it's likely not accessible to the size of business (or individual use) who get bitten by this sort of thing. Are you buying insurance against incompetence using the services? You can get professional indemnity insurance, and I guess your own LLC could probably sue your own indemnity insurance in this sort of case, but you'd need to defend the decisions as reasonable at the time and not negligent.
I have not been thrilled with Upwork, but that’s another story.
In general, I have found that you get what you pay for.
Why would I agree to pay up to $20k on a $50k cloud bill, when you could just choose to spend more on your cloud bill. I would be giving away free money and you'd get a discount.
You have to tie it to either incorrect billing, valid billing but caused by a malicious third party (i.e. hacking), or valid billing caused by negligence, and in the latter case you would need to prove negligence otherwise it's just a business deciding to use more resources and not pay for them. In the same way, fire insurance covers your house burning down, but not if you burn it down yourself.
If you wanted to sell such insurance, I'd be very happy to buy it for my upcoming $20,000 cloud bill!
A lot easier to simply not use these cloud services.
Eliminates risk of a denial of wallet like attack. That does leave risk of footguns & mistakes on my part, but that's a bit more manageable of a risk.