▲ ▼ Testing cloud services without surprise bills
In an discussion of avoiding surprise AWS bills, User Havoc on HN says:
Somewhat surprised none of the major clouds off true sandboxed learning environments as a competitive advantage. i.e. We will not charge you more than $100 no matter what. Sure that doesn't work for enterprise stuff that has to be online, but there is a big market for people that can swallow $100 accidents but not 15k. And whoever offers that first will attract the cautious crowd. I've got friends that point blank refuse to use cloud due to the open ended billing. (Azure comes closes as best as I can tell...their MSDN style credits seem to be true hard capped) [Invariably this get's the "but what to do about the data...can't just delete it...yes you can. The $100 crowd is ok with that. 30 day grace then delete it...much like anyone with an unpaid bill]
Setting budget limit can help in avoiding surprise bills, But there could be a need-gap for providing learning environments for cloud services with fixed costs.