From the other perspective it sounds to me like a sneaky "I want Amazon to bear the costs of me failing to pay for the resources I've agreed to costs for and consumed, and give me a bunch of 'grace time' to change my mind later" concern.

(<snarky> What's a gallon of milk on the shelf really cost Walmart? And how much of it is opportunity cost? If I usually buy 2 gallons a week - why can't I keep taking home a gallon every few days for a month or so after I stop paying, then cut me off afterwards? Sounds like a sneaky Walmart-wants-to-make-more-money concern.)

In the course of using Walmart in a fairly normal way to buy a gallon or two, I make a teeny mistake and take home 15 trailers of milk and they charge me full price for it.

If only Walmart would have a process in place to notice that I was ordering a spectacular and unusual amount of milk and save us all the trouble.

(Not entirely sure if you're agreeing or disagreeing with me here... ;-) )

So my local Walmart has a Netflix guy who gets 1000 trailers of milk twice a day, and the Dropbox and Yelp guys get a few hundred trailers a week each - and I know these guys from when I see them at the other Walmart in the next town over buying the same sort of amounts there as well. There's people like the Obama campaign who we'd never seen before who fairly quickly ramped up from a gallon a day to a pallet a day, then jumped straight to 50 trailerloads a week for a six months, then stopped buying milk completely one day.

What's considered "normal", "unusual", or "spectacular" - and to whom?

What's normal isn't the problem. The problem is if said Walmart doesn't have a way for a new customer to call up and say "our staff is only ever authorized to order 1 trailer a day; if they ask for more, don't fullfil until you have written confirmation that we authorise the amount, or we won't pay".

Plenty of companies operate like that, and e.g. require purchase order ids and accompanying maximum spends issued for any expense over X, where X can be very low. I've worked for companies where it was 0 - every expense, no matter how low, needed prior approval from the CEO or finance director. Not just tiny companies either - one of the strictest such policies I've dealt with was with a company of more than a hundred employees.

Then I click the "I plan to scale this to solar-system size" button when deploying, instead of the default "I'm a fallible human being and prefer not to burn piles of money" setting.

Alternatively, if you don't want the ability and risks associated with being able to scale to solar system size - use a different vendor who isn't focussed on providing that.

Amazon AWS's "important customers" are not "fallible human beings" who plan to keep their monthly spend under $100. They'd perfectly happily inconvenience thousands of those users in favour of their customers who _do_ need solar system scalability.b(And, to their credit, there's an abundance of stories around of people on typically 2 digit monthly spends who screw up and get a 4 digit bill shock - which Amazon reverse when called up and pleaded with.)

So they built their thing as "default unlimited". Because of course you would in their position - follow the money. When Netfix wants 10,000 more servers - they want it to "just work", not have them need to call support or uncheck some "cost safety" checkbox.

If you need "default cheap", AWS isn't the right tool for you. You can 100% build "default cheap" platforms on AWS if you've got the time/desire (well, down in the "I can ensure I don't go over ~$100/month - it's not real easy to configure AWS to keep costs down in the $5/month class - the monitoring and response system needs about twice that to keep running reliably).

I sometimes don't think people (especially peope who "grew up" in their dev career with "the cloud") understand just what an amazing tool AWS is - and the fact that they make it available to people like me for hobby projects or half-arsed prototype ideas still amazes me. I remember flying halfway round the world with a stack of several hundred meg hard drives in my carry on - catching a cab from the airport to PAIX so I could open up the servers we owned, and add in the drives with photos of 60,000 hotels and a hardened and tested OS upgrade. Buying those 4 servers and the identical local setup for dev/testing, getting them installed at PAIX, and flying from Sydney to California to upgrade them was probably $30+ thousand bucks and 3 months calendar time. Now I can do all that and more with one Ansible script from my laptop - or by pointing and clicking their web interface.

AWS is an _amazing_ tool - talk to some grey-beards about it some time if you don't remember how it used to get done.But the old saying holds: "With great power comes great responsibility." If you don't want to accept the responsibility, use a tool with less power. Don't for a minute think Amazon are going to put a "Ensure I don't spend as much money with AWS as I might otherwise" option in there - if there's _any_ chance of it meaning a deep-pocketed customer _ever_ gets a false positive denial from it. (WHich, now I think about it - makes this new Lightsail thing make so much more sense...)

I completely understand that AWS is designed for scaling. But I've seen CS professors and students get burned and turned off AWS when Amazon "screwed them" for a few hundred bucks when they were planning on spending $50. This is not good customer development. The next massive AWS user is a grad student right now.

On another note it makes me sad that people are so willing to justify "costs" without showing or explaining exactly what they are. Everyone needs a costs audit, yesterday.

Also how our are analogies alike? Milk is a consumable, data is information. Completely different usage pattern.

Finally, every internet service provider I've ever used that held data for some reason granted me a grace period, even if it was never officially stated. Sometimes you just have to ask nicely