alt Hacker NewsYes, you are on the money. A cloud service provider needs to maintain reliability first and foremost, which means they won't have a runtime dependency on their billing system.
This means that billing happens asynchronously. You may use queues, you may do batching, etc. But you won't have a realtime view of the costs
>they won't have a runtime dependency on their billing system
Well, that makes sense in principle, but they obviously do have some billing check that prevents me from making additional requests after that "final query". And they definitely have some check to prevent me from overutilizing my quota when I have an active monthly subscription. So whatever it is that they need to do, when I prepay $x, I'm not ok with them charging me more than that (or I would have prepaid more). It's up to them to figure this out and/or absorb the costs.