HACKER Q&A
📣 tikkun

What do you do to prevent runaway billing cloud costs from bugs?


Had an error on vercel recently that caused unexpected costs and had the same on gcp. (Not saying it's the platform's fault)

What do you use/do to prevent unexpected costs and runaway billing issues? e.g. what kinds of manual scripts, or any purpose-designed tools


  👤 bob1029 Accepted Answer ✓
We set up some cost alerts in Azure to email us a warning if we trip certain thresholds. Do the other hyperscalars not offer this kind of feature?

👤 AlexITC
Simple, use services providing a fixed price like DigitalOcean, with services with variable cost like Github Actions, we just set a monthly limit. I avoid services where this isn't possible unless I'm confident that there is no way to get into a huge bill.

👤 throwaway154
Avoid providers that can't (don't, can't, they always can if they want to) provide you with useful limits. Use ones that can.

👤 theodpHN
Makes one long for a Cloud version of available-since-the-1970s granular IBM mainframe job accounting controls, eh?

https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos/2.1.0?topic=parameter-exampl...


👤 FourSigma
Could someone please rundown the pros and cons of using third party cost management software (ex. Ternary)? Are the tools in this space specifically designed for enterprise level cloud cost management?

There seem to be a lot of options out there. Would love a critical overview and recommendations for SaaS in this space.