I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, but there really should be some safeguards that can trip along the way for what is clearly an individual account. Also there should always be hard limits available to turn on (maybe turned on by default).

Perhaps some kind of "we only let your bill be X% higher than the rolling average for your account" coupled with "First time you hit $10, $50, $100, $500, $1K .... firebreaks, alarms coupled with auto-stop/shutdown if you don't respond with a day or two". All of this would be available to turn off so it would just serve as a safety net.

> Vibe Coding failed me

Hm, edited out snark. I think that's an easy trap to fall into, and it's good to warn against.

What I agree on (top comment): there should be laws against providing cloud services without a fee cap. Another edit: businesses and hobbyists are different beasts of course. You can't demand scaling and reliability and a hard fee cap. For traditional shared hosting, this is mostly a solved problem AFAIK.

That's what prevented me from using Firebase for a hobby project in 2023.

The only available killswitch was some weird workaround with a Google Sheets monitoring the bill and triggering an action (give or take latency) when it exceeded some amount...

ehm, no thanks.

The vast majority of my personal stuff runs on $6-$12 VMs. No matter what happens, what dumb mistake I make or an agent makes on my behalf, I can only ever be out $6-$12. And, this is exactly why. The "free tier" all these big cloud companies offer is kind of a trap. Sure, you can do a lot for free, but mistakes happen and they've got your card on file.

Use fixed price hosting resources, those cannot bite you and if they're too small you can always expand by buying more virtual hosts, or even program your own simple scaler (which i am 99.9% sure you will not need this or next year after starting a project). AI is capable of setting up local database, and everything you need without paying 10x to a cloud provider.

$34k for this one someone posted months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787042

I had the exact same thing happen a few weeks ago - a DO alarm accidentally set to a past time, retriggering immediately. Claude caught it within a couple minutes from its log tail, though.

Often the most expensive lesson of your life (as OP put it) is also the most valuable lesson. Everybody makes mistakes, learn to expect failures so you can mitigate the effects when they happen.

I guess no one is going to prison! Unlike the poor guy in the other thread! We have all finally become peasants!

This is why I use VPS from hetzner. I do host static frontends at cloudflare but those are static assets.

that's quite cheap for 6 trillion requests, that's like 555M for a dollar

I’m curious what the most expensive lesson of his life was.

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I'm glad the author just paid it, and learned the lesson.

But yes, these platforms should default to hard caps that you have to explicitly disable.