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Somewhat surprised none of the major clouds off true sandboxed learning environments as a competitive advantage. i.e. We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not 15k. And whoever offers that first will attract the cautious crowd. I've got friends that point blank refuse to use cloud due to the open ended billing.

(Azure comes closes as best as I can tell...their MSDN style credits seem to be true hard capped)

[Invariably this get's the "but what to do about the data...can't just delete it...yes you can. The $100 crowd is ok with that. 30 day grace then delete it...much like anyone with an unpaid bill]




Isn't this DigitalOcean's whole business model, basically?


Yeah. There are lots of hard capped options...just not among the big clouds. Which is fair

I just don't get why the big 3 haven't tried to undercut their competition with this.

It's a very easy way to attract casual dabblers and enthusiasts to your platforms


Arguably, casual dabblers is what gets you increased support costs and does not land the big contracts. I wouldn't be surprised if AWS and GCP _intentionally_ do not do this because they'd rather focus on large enterprises "who are willing to foot the bill"


Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts, there's a very explicit step between free and paid services.


>Google Cloud does this with new trial accounts

I've already got an account that has used free credits. So me creating another account to utilise the free allowance again would presumably be not OK


Or maybe you want that crowd to go to someone else's infrastructure. And therefore you don't build it, and no one else builds it.


> We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not 15k

I’m sure this market is actually tiny


And you'd be competing for the price-sensitive (ie worst) customers


Exactly.




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