Stop accepting requests like has been the case since the beginning of time?

Or simply returns 503? Why would you go directly to destroying things??

While I can imagine having budget overload from storage, most (all?) of the "horrors" on the page are from compute or access.

Set it up so that machines are deleted, but EBS volumes remain. S3 bucket is locked-out but data is safe.

I mean, would you rather have a $10k build or have your server forcefully shut down after you hit $1k in three days?

One of those things is more important to different types of business. In some situations, any downtime at all is worth thousands per hour. In others, the service staying online is only worth hundreds of dollars a week.

So yes, the solution is as simple as giving the user hard spend caps that they can configure. I'd also set the default limits low for new accounts with a giant, obnoxious, flashing red popover that you cannot dismiss until you configure your limits.

However, this would generate less profit for Amazon et al. They have certainly run this calculation and decided they'd earn more money from careless businesses than they'd gain in goodwill. And we all know that goodwill has zero value to companies at FAANG scale. There's absolutely no chance that they haven't considered this. It's partially implemented and an incredibly obvious solution that everyone has been begging for since cloud computing became a thing. The only reason they haven't implemented this is purely greed and malice.

There are several satisfactory solutions available. Every other solution they offer was made with tradeoffs and ambiguous requirements they had to make a call on. It is obviously misaligned incentive rather than an impossibility. If they could make more money from it, they would be offering something. Product offering gaps are not merely technical impossibilities.

Yes, that’s exactly the expected behavior. It can alert if it’s closed to threshold. Very straightforward from my point of view.

Surely that's the fault of the purchaser setting the cap too low.

Maybe rather than completely stopping the service, it'd be better to rate limit the service when approaching/reaching the cap.