Simon Willison: Pay-by-usage services need default hard budget caps
latticecut · x · 2026-10-04
Simon Willison argues that with coding and personal agents making it trivial to spin up code that spends money — paid APIs, hosted apps, compute and storage — pay-by-usage services need default hard budget caps: once you exceed $X/month, the service is cut off and returns errors, not just a warning email.
- Soft caps don't work: nobody wants to wake up to a rogue service that burned thousands of dollars overnight
- Businesses may dislike errors, but most would prefer errors over a surprise $10,000+ bill
- Going over the limit should be opt-in, via a clear checkbox removing the cap at the user's own responsibility
- He most wants AWS to do this — fear of runaway bills keeps many people from using it for personal projects
The reposter notes DeepFlow already implements such caps at the org, team, person, agent, project, workflow and task levels.
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