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Comment by fergie | Hacker News Reader

Is it possible for hobbyists to set a hard cut off for spending? Like, "SHUT EVERYTHING DOWN IF COSTS EXCEED $50"

You can with some effort, but cloud providers don't provide real-time information on how much you're spending. Even if you use spending alerts to program a hard cut-off yourself, a mistake can still result in you being charged for 6+ hours of usage before the alert fires.

> You can with some effort, but cloud providers don't provide real-time information on how much you're spending.

This should be illegal. If you can't inform me about the bill on my request you shouldn't be legally able to charge me that bill. Although I can already imagine plenty of ways somebody could do malicious compliance with that rule.

my understanding from reading this kind of threads is that there is no real way to enforce it and the provider makes no guarantees, as your usage can outpace the system that is handling the accounting and shutoff

That sounds like an architecture choice? One that would cause less revenue on the AWS side, with a conflicting incentive there.

to be fair, im not sure its a conscious choice, since its not really easy to couple lets say data transfer bytes directly to billing data in real time, and im sure that would also use up a lot of resources.

But of course, the incentive to optimize this is not there.

I mean, generally real time isn't needed. Even hourly updates could save a massive amount of headache. 24 hours or more is becoming excessive.

AWS already does per hour billing for spot instances.

Shut down everything? Including S3? There goes all your data.

Turn off S3 requests, but keep the data.

Yes, but you have to program it. And there is a little bit of whack so it might be $51 or something like that.

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