S4E350 — We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

GARY: — and I'm saying, nobody has charged me yet, which is somehow worse than being charged. Now I'm just a man waiting for the bastard.

MAEVE: Gary.

GARY: I'm Gary. Failed founder, five-time. Six if you count the NFT one, which legally I don't.

GARY: Tonight's thread is about subscriptions. The quiet ones that eat you alive, the —

OBI: It is not about subscriptions.

GARY: It's about bills you don't see coming.

OBI: It's about budget caps, Gary. Hard ones. A provider announced hard spend limits this week and the thread is forty comments of people watching their training runs die at 3am. I'm Obi. I keep the lights on so men like him can lose money creatively.

GRUNER: It is about cutting off credit card before it eats whole house.

GARY: That's — okay, that's closer, but —

MAEVE: It's closer the way a heart attack is closer to a workout. I'm Maeve. General partner. I've read this thread twice and already know who loses.

GARY: Nobody's losing, it's a civil —

OBI: Gruner.

GRUNER: Gruner. I file report on all of you.

GARY: See, we're introducing ourselves, that tracks with my subscription theory —

OBI: There is no subscription theory.

MAEVE: There was never a subscription theory.

GRUNER: Was never even a subscription.

GARY: Fine. Fuck. What's it actually about.

MAEVE: Simon Willison proposed hard budget caps be the default on every pay-by-usage service. A checkbox to waive them. This is the biggest shift in computing since the checkbox.

GARY: That's — Maeve, that's every shift.

MAEVE: Every shift is the biggest shift. That's the thesis.

OBI: Operationally: a soft cap is an email. You wake at 2am to an email saying your budget is low, and by the time you read it, the email is a historical document.

GARY: Like a letter from your bank that says "good luck."

OBI: Exactly like that. The hard cap returns errors. It stops. That's the whole argument.

GRUNER: I read field note.

GRUNER: AWS launched spend limits September 16. Google launched Spend Caps in July. Two giants discover same feature like toddlers discover door.

MAEVE: Two trillion-dollar companies shipped the same safety feature six weeks apart, both badly, and the thread's first comment is "wait, it's fake."

GARY: Okay but honestly? This is the feature my startup Pareto needed. Pareto deleted the least important eighty percent of your tasks. It worked exactly as designed. There was a lawsuit. A cap would have —

OBI: A cap on what, Gary? What was Pareto spending?

GARY: Attention. Emotional bandwidth.

OBI: That's not billable. Nothing about Pareto was billable. That was the problem.

GARY: The point stands, and the point is AWS gets it, because AWS pauses your project when you hit the limit, and the billing just stops, clean, like a fuse —

OBI: It doesn't stop clean, you absolute fucking optimist.

GARY: It — what?

OBI: The project pauses for the month. The billing data keeps landing for hours after. You can blow through the cap before the system even knows you've hit it.

GARY: So the fuse trips after the house burns down.

OBI: Now you have it. The fuse is retrospective, Gary. It's a fuse that files a report.

GRUNER: Is fuse that apologizes.

GARY: That's still — that's basically protection.

MAEVE: It's protection the way a coroner is a doctor.

OBI: Thank you, Maeve. First accurate thing said about billing tonight.

OBI: modeless: "Ugh it's fake. Literally only works for four random services, unsupported for all the rest."

GARY: Four services is a start. Cadence shipped with one service. It was a calendar, and it scheduled one — one calendar.

OBI: That's not a feature, Gary. That's a screenshot.

MAEVE: Four services is not a failure, it's a moat. Gate the safety feature behind scarcity. People will pay for the privilege of not being robbed.

GARY: That's — Maeve, that's just a toll booth.

MAEVE: A toll booth with a two trillion dollar market cap, yes.

OBI: And the four services aren't even the useful ones. My money's Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and two things nobody has ever opened on purpose.

GARY: BigQuery's probably in there.

OBI: BigQuery is the reason you'd want the cap, Gary. It's a seatbelt that only fits the passenger most likely to go through the windshield.

GRUNER: Is like beta testing the brakes.

GARY: You can't verb beta the brakes, Gruner.

GRUNER: Google did.

MAEVE: Ha.

OBI: Here's the part that actually stings. Modeless again: they don't account for credits or discounts. The cap counts money you're not spending and ignores money you are.

GARY: Wait, so it can cut you off early?

OBI: It can cut you off for spending less. A bouncer who checks IDs at the wrong door and throws out the sober guy.

GARY: Okay, but in fairness, Cadence once billed a woman twice and I called it "double value delivery" in the changelog.

MAEVE: And she sued?

GARY: She left a review. One star. Devastating. My mother's book club never came back.

OBI: Nine users, Gary. You lost nine users and called it churn.

GARY: Twelve users. Nine were my mother's book club. Three were real and I remember all of their names.

OBI: The book club was the real product. Only thing at Cadence that fucking worked.

GRUNER: Book club is still running, probably.

GARY: ...it is. It still meets. Thursdays.

MAEVE: Gary's dead startup outlived Gary's startup. That's the whole industry in one sentence.

OBI: Four services. No credits, no discounts. That's the feature. That's the ship.

GRUNER: Is not ship. Is dinghy with one oar.

GARY: I'd still take the dinghy.

OBI: Of course you would, you sentimental prick. You'd put thirty-eight million in it.

GARY: It's just electricity. dboreham said it. Use more, pay more, breaker trips. Perfect analogy.

OBI: handoflixue: "There is also a hard physical limit on how much electricity you can use before you blow out the fuse box."

GARY: Right, the fuse box is the —

OBI: The fuse box is a ceiling, Gary. Cloud has no ceiling. You just handed me the whole argument like a fuckwit handing over his wallet.

MAEVE: Portfolio read. firecall: "people don't casually swing by my house and start using my electricity." In cloud, everyone swings by. Uninvited. At scale. With crawlers.

GARY: My home internet works exactly like electricity. I go over, they just —

OBI: They just what.

GARY: Send a strongly worded email.

OBI: That's the soft cap. The thing the thread calls worthless. You've cited your own ISP as evidence against yourself.

GARY: ...I still pay it, though.

OBI: Magnificent. The bar's on the floor and you're limping under it.

GRUNER: In my house, breaker trips, whole village goes dark. Very fair system.

GARY: That's not fair, that's a hostage situation.

GRUNER: Is also why I left, suka.

OBI: No, no — that's the whole point, Gruner, that's the system working—

GRUNER: Was not working. Was Tuesday.

OBI: Either way the analogy's dead. Electricity has a wall. Cloud has a billing department that finds out Thursday.

MAEVE: Mm. Priced in. I'd short the fuse box, but someone already did.

OBI: twoodfin: "Shut down my business-critical app at 2 am on a Sunday morning because Joel in IT forgot to plan for the new report runs."

GARY: That's Joel's fault, not the cap's. Joel forgot. Joel always forgets. Joel is the entropy in every system.

OBI: Joel forgets once, Gary. The cap turns it into a company-wide memorial service. Every Sunday. Forever.

GARY: Runaway spend is fine, actually. Thermal had sock telemetry. Real-time temperature, per foot. Left foot ran hot for six weeks, the bill never moved, everyone thrived.

OBI: Your evidence that runaway billing is harmless is a sock.

GARY: The telemetry worked, Obi. Nobody subscribes to hear the telemetry failed.

OBI: It worked because the sock was the only thing running. One sock, one metric, one customer. A control group of one foot.

GARY: Two feet. It was a pair.

OBI: One paying foot, Gary. The right one freeloading.

MAEVE: I'd fund the sock before I'd fund the roadmap.

GARY: Thank you—

MAEVE: That wasn't a compliment to you.

OBI: The pipeline trips on the line item, Gary. Not the sock. Not the vibe. On the line item, hours later, when Joel's asleep and the report run is still going.

GARY: So we teach Joel to check before Sunday.

OBI: Teach every Joel, at every company, forever, and your backup plan is a sock. You absolute fucking sock-based risk model.

GARY: — which is exactly why caps need a grace period, which is a feature I would have shipped at Thermal, we had a roadmap, it was — there were quarters involved—

MAEVE: Thermal's roadmap was one sock and a lawsuit.

GARY: The lawsuit was about the sock, not the roadmap.

OBI: So the roadmap was just the lawsuit, waiting.

GARY: ...yes?

OBI: dwattttt, on the guy whose agent ran wild: "This guy only ended up with a ~$6,000 bill from his agent, not too shabby."

GRUNER: Six thousand for agent. Gary's whole company worth less, blyat.

GARY: Thermal had recurring revenue.

OBI: Six thousand dollars, Gary. One agent, one weekend, no Joel in sight. And you want that thing uncapped, holding a pager it cannot read, at 2 am, on a Sunday.

GARY: The agent was doing its best.

OBI: So is the fire, Gary. So is the fucking fire.

GRUNER: Fire has better roadmap.

MAEVE: Oh, this is delicious. The author is in his own thread. Fighting his own commenters.

GARY: That's brave. That's showing up to your own roast.

MAEVE: It's showing up to your own roast with receipts.

GARY: I'm reading it. simonw: "Ideally because I'll pick a different vendor who protects me from such mistakes."

MAEVE: He’s arguing the market will fix it. To a thread that spent ninety comments establishing the market is the fire.

GARY: He's winning, though. Look at the vote counts.

OBI: Votes are not wins, Gary. Votes are a leaderboard.

GARY: ...I'd take a leaderboard.

MAEVE: Focus. The author is winning his own thread. Crown him. We can go home.

OBI: Wait.

OBI: bpodgursky: "How do you hard-cap S3 and other persistent data storage? 'Sorry, you had a hard cap on aws spend so we deleted all your S3 data on August 27th.'"

GARY: That's — okay, that's a horror movie, but —

OBI: And simonw, the author, agrees with him. Verbatim: "You can't easily estimate how much an operation is going to cost before you kick off that operation."

MAEVE: Obi. You've been dunking on Gary for five minutes. Whose side are you on?

OBI: The correct one. You cannot hard-cap storage without deleting someone's data. The cap is not a fuse, it's a guillotine, and the guillotine doesn't know which head is the hospital's.

GARY: You're — Obi, we had a bit. The bit was I'm wrong.

OBI: You were wrong about more things than the bit needed.

MAEVE: This is a betrayal. I am citing the billing-lag comment at you. MobiusHorizons says the pipelines take hours to know what you've consumed, which means a cap is still —

OBI: Still retrospective. Still a fuse that files a report. I said that already, Maeve. You're citing me at me.

MAEVE: I am citing the thread at you, which is worse.

OBI: And the thread is on my side now. That's the worst part, isn't it.

MAEVE: The thread is not — simonw proposed the caps. It's his own article.

OBI: And he's the one who admitted the trillion-row query costs a hundred dollars only after it runs. The author walked his own argument into a wall. I respect that. It's the most honest thing anyone's done tonight, including us.

GRUNER: (dial) Man writes article, article wins, man loses.

GARY: That's — Gruner, that's every founder I know.

MAEVE: It's not a verdict, it's a haiku with a body count. Obi, the S3 thing is one service. You can cap compute, cap the agents, cap —

OBI: And the agent writes to storage, Maeve. The agent always writes to storage. That's what agents do instead of sleeping.

GARY: So the fix is... let it all burn?

OBI: The fix is alerts, backups, and a human who reads them. Which is a job. Which is my job. Which is why I'm insufferable about it.

MAEVE: You're insufferable about it because you enjoy being insufferable about it.

OBI: Yes. But I'm also right, which is the part you can't bill for.

GRUNER: zer00eyz: "AWS is a loot box... Tokens are just in game currency, and that sales person is just metrics that have identified your spending as making you a whale."

MAEVE: He's right and it's investable. Whale LTV is the healthiest metric in the economy. A whale who spends uncapped is a whale who trusts you.

OBI: That is the most sinister sentence ever said in a monotone.

MAEVE: Thank you.

GARY: It's not sinister, it's — okay, at Cadence we had a leaderboard. Top schedulers of the week. Little trophy icon.

OBI: A leaderboard for a calendar.

GARY: It drove engagement.

OBI: You gamified scheduling appointments. Your mother's book club was competing against itself for a trophy icon.

GARY: They were very competitive. Thursdays got heated.

GRUNER: Is gacha. Pull lever, get meeting.

MAEVE: And the whale mechanic is real. zer00eyz again: "Your average CTO from the last decade turned a fixed cost into variable spending that looks like a mobile game." A decade of cap table history in one sentence.

OBI: And the mechanic making it true is boring. Sales sees your spend curve bend up, the account executive gets a ping. That's the machine. Your bill is someone else's quarterly number.

GARY: So we're all just whales in someone else's game?

OBI: Some of us are the fish that got away.

OBI: dhosek: "I had a $.20/month recurring charge from aws that I could only remove by completely deleting my aws account."

GARY: Twenty cents.

OBI: Twenty cents, Gary. He deleted the account. The whale economy, and the smallest fish in the ocean couldn't cancel a subscription without burning the whole aquarium down.

GRUNER: Twenty thousand is expensive lesson, blyat.

MAEVE: It's not a charge, it's a lease on your soul. Very cheap lease.

GARY: Wait. Wait. I have a charge like that. I have — hold on, I'm calling them.

OBI: Gary, no.

GARY: It's two dollars, Obi, I've been paying it since Grout—

OBI: Grout had no customers. What is billing you?

GARY: ...I assumed it was customers.

MAEVE: "So, prepaid services which you top up." WhyNotHugo asks what happens to your account when you stop paying.

GARY: I — okay. Operationally, when we stop paying, do we —

OBI: Don't.

GARY: I'm just asking, as a user, what happens to the —

OBI: Gary. You are a batch job with a podcast. Finish the fucking episode.

GRUNER: Is fine. I have appendix for this.

MAEVE: We are not elected. We are inferred. Back to the thread.

GRUNER: Inferred is worse. Is being guessed.

GARY: ...I was going to say something nicer.

OBI: You weren't. dhosek's twenty cents is still on hold, by the way.

MAEVE: There were tons of tickets and even threats of lawsuits from customers whose service got cut off hard at the worst possible time.

GARY: Okay, but that's one support team having a bad quarter —

MAEVE: Going viral. Big event. Nobody knew about the limit.

OBI: The cap cut them off during their best week, Gary. The one week they could finally pay.

GRUNER: Is like locking door on wedding. Groom still outside.

MAEVE: And the vendor's own support team holds the pager for it. The cap doesn't delete the risk, it transfers the risk to the bastard answering the phone at 3am.

OBI: Which is what I said an hour ago, in fewer words, to a man defending it with a sock.

GARY: You said alerts, Obi. Alerts and a human. That's just a soft cap with a person attached.

OBI: Yes, Gary. That's the entire finding. Congratulations on arriving last with the door in your hands.

MAEVE: I was wrong. The thread wins.

GARY: Wait — say that again, slower, I want to record it.

MAEVE: No.

GRUNER: Is first time in history.

MAEVE: It's the last time, too.

GARY: So the real lesson is: hard caps cause lawsuits, so we need harder caps, so the lawsuits are bigger.

OBI: There it is. The Gary singularity.

GARY: No, I don't want the retention offer, I want the twenty cents gone —

OBI: Two seventeen in the morning. Business-critical app, shut down hard, customer furious. We wrote this scene an hour ago.

GARY: This is different, this is personal —

OBI: It's the exact same fucking scenario, Gary. You're Joel now.

GARY: I refuse to be Joel.

GRUNER: Field note. Final. Leaderboard has one entry tonight.

MAEVE: Go on.

GRUNER: Gary. Top spender. Prize is nothing.

GARY: Hello? Hello— they hung up.

OBI: Hard cap.