Simon Willison calls for default hard budget caps on cloud services

Developer Simon Willison argues that pay-by-usage services should ship with hard budget caps enabled by default, cutting off spending instead of just sending warning emails. AWS launched monthly spend limits on 16th September, and Google Cloud introduced Spend Caps in July.

• Willison: soft caps with warning emails don't protect against surprise bills
• AWS monthly spend limit pauses a project once the cap is reached
• Google Cloud launched Spend Caps in July 2026
• The new AWS feature is currently limited to select customers