I don't understand how anyone uses a paid API for a personal project. I looked hard into MS, Google and Amazon a few years ago for a project and couldn't find anywhere where you could hard block services to never ever go above the free tier.

Considering that I'll build a project and forget about it for years, putting in my credit card into a cloud service was a guaranteed gigantic bill sometime in the future when things went wrong. (Over your life, something is guaranteed to go wrong.)

[–] poke@sh.itjust.works 10 points 6 months ago

Oracle cloud will stop things if it goes out of the free tier.

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago

to answer your question you can with budgets under cost explorer and running everything as a cloudformation template

[–] whereisk@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Have you heard of virtual debit cards? You can't charge what's not there.

Also, at least AWS will in fact send you an email when you approach the end of free tour usage.

Having said all that, most devs can host the few hundred visits they might get over a month with a $200 home server and a free CloudFlare cache if they know what they're doing.

[–] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 13 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Have you heard of virtual debit cards?

I tried one and it didn't work. Reading about it said they block those.

I don't need an email. I need it to stop instantly. In the time it takes me to notice an email, I could have hundreds of dollars in charges.

[–] kogasa@programming.dev 9 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

All cloud providers will support budget notifications. That doesn't do much good when you shoot past the budget in a short timespan. I set a Google cloud budget of $20/month and enabled a Tensorboard instance, which had no observable indication that it cost anything except the base cost of the VM, and got notified that I was $280 over budget the next day. Apparently there was an upfront $300/month/user fee for Tensorboard. (Several months later they changed the pricing model to $10 GiB/month with no user fee.)