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- Creators/
- Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django/
- We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything/
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-10-05)
- Simon Willison argues for “default hard budget caps” on pay-by-usage services and APIs, which should cut off service rather than just sending warnings, to prevent unexpected high bills from runaway code or agents.
- He emphasizes that soft caps (warning emails) are insufficient, especially with the rise of coding and personal agents that reduce the friction of deploying cost-incurring services.
- AWS recently launched “spending limits” (though currently limited availability) and Google Cloud introduced “Spend Caps” in July, indicating a positive trend towards this essential feature.
- Users should prioritize services with hard budget caps, and providers should make these the default, requiring an explicit opt-in to remove them and accept responsibility for uncapped charges.