Edit: Ugh it's fake. Literally only works for four random services, unsupported for all the rest. Completely useless. Also dumb that the only supported term is "monthly" considering that months are different lengths, and that they don't bother to account for credits or discounts. Maybe next decade they'll get around to implementing something useful.
These shouldn't even exist without a negotiated contract.
I can subscribe to your service for a specific fee on a monthly basis ($20/month say), and take the risk of losing that month's fee if your service or I make mistakes, or I can choose to drop another $20 mid-month, or anything for convenience.
Saying that the computer will "control" the billing and can run haywire tells me that I don't want to be anywhere near your pile of bad incentives.
Having a monthly summary or estimate of how your spending is going would be really useful, too.
Even if we have a negotiated yearly contract for $X spend per year, maybe we’ll hit that spend in 6 months instead of 12. Having some kind of automated telemetry saying how we’re trending would be so useful.
I’ve gotten vague warnings from customer success people saying vaguely that, but without any warning of what’s truly happening. The more we abstract away from money (tokens, credits, etc), the more we need a way to translate right back to money, to see how close we’re getting to any limits over time.
I don’t want to find out in month 5 that the contract which was expected to cover a year is now going to run out in 14 days.
My org has a leaderboard for AI spending each month, and I have found it interesting how fast the distribution decays, just within the top 10 users. I often think “what did these people do with all those tokens?” It’s interesting to think the answer to that question is “maybe not a lot?”
We always did, the clouds convinced us that overages were the norm. You can blame credit ratings as another vector for big business to screw everyone over. Everything should have been pay in advance with an alternate billing method for overages if you want it.
Counterpoint: if you can automate API calls on the client side, why can't you automate billing caps? If you want a machine that can run 24-7 and make money for you while you sleep (which let's face it is the motivation for a lot of AI takeup), isn't the onus on you to install cicuit-breakers?
Because many cloud services have incredibly complex or opaque pricing structures that make it difficult to impossible to determine how much something is going to cost you ahead of time, especially if it's usage-based a la network egress (and the usage statistics don't update frequently enough to make such circuit breakers possible to implement client-side).
They might not be able to predict your bill but how much time do they need to add up what you already spent to minimize your overage? And TBH how much time should be acceptable to exceed your cap before it's their fault for the lag in their software.
I'm not sure where you got the impression that I'm making excuses for cloud providers. I'm just stating the way things are, not the way I think they should be.
I would just not sign up for a service without price transparency, or pre-calculate my liability based on available information before pushing the (metaphorical) Deliver Now button.
Making incredibly complex and opaque pricing structures is not necessary for the providers to charge for and make a profit on their service. And being technically difficult is a lazy excuse. Cloud platforms have to solve many, much more difficult challenges to offer their services at all, they just don’t want to invest the time in more customer friendly billing because they expect it will result in reduced revenues.
I know your post isn’t explicitly defending the platforms, but the arguments they use feel transparently flimsy.
I had an api key set to read only that somehow ran up a $400 bill, I contacted openai about it and never heard back. Not quite the same thing, but still, I find this very annoying.
It'd be nice if more than AI spend worked this way, autoscaling is almost a mixed blessing because unpredictable pricing can be worse than the cost savings...
Ubicloud does not have hard budget caps, which I only realized this morning after moving all my CI over to them over the past few months. Fortunately I didn't learn the hard way.
I understand this is snark, but if you think about it, this is already implemented in electrical infrastructure. If I use too much power, the circuit breaker trips to protect me and protect the electrical grid. OP is about a billing breaker, but the parallels should be obvious.
If the CEO of the electric company didn't mandate circuit breakers, he should go to jail.
Why do people think new laws are needed to solve every last problem in the world?
Google implemented caps because their competitors offered them. Before that, customers could choose one of several competitors, rent the GPUs at a fixed rate, or buy the GPUs and install them on-premises.
At no point was any law needed to solve any of this.
Yes and no. I suspect many of the hard limits were set arbitrarily, and we'll see a relaxation of limits as people get frustrated with the limited use they get out of them. And some services will genuinely need to be re written to support higher rps or risk losing customers
AWS, is a loot box... Tokens are just in game currency, and that sales person is just metrics that have identified your spending as making you a whale.
Your average CTO from the last decade turned a fixed cost into variable spending that looks like a mobile game.
I'd support this provided we have the converse as well: if the customer doesn't pay their bill on time, the service gets shut down immediately. (Disclosure: I sell SaaS services to people who don't pay their bills on time).
the premise seems a bit faulty to me. why should we be giving next token predictors access to spend our money? like what great benefit do we get from this that we should allow them unfettered access, but with safeguards in the form of hard budget caps?
I don't think Simon means you should hand off the spending to agents/LLM (which would also make me uneasy) but that if you're probing one for hosting/SaaS providers they should default to recommending ones with budget caps
Because it’s unlikely they’ll actually be able to collect that million dollars from a lot of those customers. Rephrased: why would your vendor want to make it harder to accidentally give you a million dollars of services in exchange for debt of dubious quality?
Seriously. You all asked for this.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/cost-management/new-ear...
Edit: Ugh it's fake. Literally only works for four random services, unsupported for all the rest. Completely useless. Also dumb that the only supported term is "monthly" considering that months are different lengths, and that they don't bother to account for credits or discounts. Maybe next decade they'll get around to implementing something useful.
I can subscribe to your service for a specific fee on a monthly basis ($20/month say), and take the risk of losing that month's fee if your service or I make mistakes, or I can choose to drop another $20 mid-month, or anything for convenience.
Saying that the computer will "control" the billing and can run haywire tells me that I don't want to be anywhere near your pile of bad incentives.
Even if we have a negotiated yearly contract for $X spend per year, maybe we’ll hit that spend in 6 months instead of 12. Having some kind of automated telemetry saying how we’re trending would be so useful.
I’ve gotten vague warnings from customer success people saying vaguely that, but without any warning of what’s truly happening. The more we abstract away from money (tokens, credits, etc), the more we need a way to translate right back to money, to see how close we’re getting to any limits over time.
I don’t want to find out in month 5 that the contract which was expected to cover a year is now going to run out in 14 days.
It works for some non-B2Bs.
Then the irony of whether or not your capped SaaS proxy SaaS product itself has hard caps.
That said, the limits are accurate with Claude to a handful of cents over the last few months. I just don’t see it as a big deal.
Our Gemini API usage is also similarly accurate.
The LLM costs are way more accurate than the limits on our GCP env as a whole.
If you don’t have a mechanism for enforcing hard caps, you don’t get to send customers a bill for unlimited amounts.
I know your post isn’t explicitly defending the platforms, but the arguments they use feel transparently flimsy.
If the CEO of the electric company didn't mandate circuit breakers, he should go to jail.
Google implemented caps because their competitors offered them. Before that, customers could choose one of several competitors, rent the GPUs at a fixed rate, or buy the GPUs and install them on-premises.
At no point was any law needed to solve any of this.
AWS, is a loot box... Tokens are just in game currency, and that sales person is just metrics that have identified your spending as making you a whale.
Your average CTO from the last decade turned a fixed cost into variable spending that looks like a mobile game.
What on earth is Simon whittering on about?