We’re going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

Hard budget caps are an essential feature that the world will increasingly require in the coming months and years. When using pay-by-usage services and APIs, it is crucial to have hard limits, such as "after $X/month, cut this thing off and return errors." Soft caps, like sending a warning email after reaching $X/month, are insufficient and will not suffice.

Coding and personal agents, which are less threatening and easier to use, can significantly reduce the friction of deploying code that may incur costs, such as calls to paid APIs, hosted web applications, or systems that handle additional storage and compute.

The absence of hard budget caps can lead to unexpected and significant expenses. A common concern is that businesses and individuals would prefer to receive an error message instead of being surprised with a substantial bill. To address this issue, hard budget caps should be the default setting. While some individuals may wish to run their applications without budget limits, this should only be an opt-in option.

The service should clearly provide a checkbox to remove the budget cap, ensuring that the application will be shut down and the user will be responsible for subsequent charges if the configured budget is exceeded.

One provider that has recently introduced spending limits is AWS. In their announcement on September 16th, they mentioned that users can set a monthly spend limit for their projects based on usage patterns. If a project's usage reaches its spending limit, the project will be paused for that month. This is a strong step towards promoting responsible use of cloud resources.

Google Cloud also launched a similar feature called Spend Caps in July, allowing users to set a monthly financial cap on specific services within a project.

The trend of implementing hard budget caps is becoming more common as businesses and individuals recognize the importance of financial control when using cloud services. In the ideal world, agents such as coding and personal agents could promote the use of providers with hard budget caps and warn new and inexperienced builders against deploying applications using uncapped services. This practice would help protect businesses and individuals from potential financial pitfalls associated with runaway services.