A very charitable take, in light of tech industry habits of exorbitant rent-seeking in scenarios of Platform Dominance (e.g. Google and Apple on the app store). We should remember AWS and Google companies are among the best in the world at A/B testing and extracting revenue from cloud services.
When you're one of only two real options out there, you can afford to demand users put up with things that on their surface seem ridiculous. Such as a billing system that (oops!) makes it difficult for customers to see where their costs are coming from, trim their largest sources of spend, notice meaningful changes in line item prices, or limit their spend. Wild how they can figure out a million different advanced services but gosh-darn-it can't figure out the hardtech of displaying line items.
Large enterprises can afford employees who are tasked full time with unwinding this capacity to mitigate the impact of these billing headaches. But I think this measure is introduced now because LLMs introduced a risk that these billing specialists could not control without caps.
Historically, the creative process has been a revolving door of people who are fed up with the status quo, and who later become the status quo, so I wouldn't worry too much about that.
When you're one of only two real options out there, you can afford to demand users put up with things that on their surface seem ridiculous. Such as a billing system that (oops!) makes it difficult for customers to see where their costs are coming from, trim their largest sources of spend, notice meaningful changes in line item prices, or limit their spend. Wild how they can figure out a million different advanced services but gosh-darn-it can't figure out the hardtech of displaying line items.
Large enterprises can afford employees who are tasked full time with unwinding this capacity to mitigate the impact of these billing headaches. But I think this measure is introduced now because LLMs introduced a risk that these billing specialists could not control without caps.