> I can explicitly cancel a subscription after a certain date—what is the problem with me explicitly cancelling a subscription after a certain amount of spend?
As someone also involved in billing systems for public clouds: in theory there's no difference, but in practice there is a world of difference. This is the sort of situation where the end user is commonly surprised with the consequences of their own decisions. At MGC we have some "soft shut down" processes, and we constantly hear stuff like "I know I said shut down, but this is the one situation where that really didn't make sense"; where examples are "storage which keeps backups became unavailable", "a very simple but critical user auth system disappeared", "I had no idea this was still running on my account", or "OMG not in the middle of the weekend", etc. You can build heuristics and tracking into the system to minimize these situations, but that's a lot of work.
So yeah, it is a valid use case and something many CSPs would like to provide, but implementing something that is actually better than nothing is non-trivial.
As someone also involved in billing systems for public clouds: in theory there's no difference, but in practice there is a world of difference. This is the sort of situation where the end user is commonly surprised with the consequences of their own decisions. At MGC we have some "soft shut down" processes, and we constantly hear stuff like "I know I said shut down, but this is the one situation where that really didn't make sense"; where examples are "storage which keeps backups became unavailable", "a very simple but critical user auth system disappeared", "I had no idea this was still running on my account", or "OMG not in the middle of the weekend", etc. You can build heuristics and tracking into the system to minimize these situations, but that's a lot of work.
So yeah, it is a valid use case and something many CSPs would like to provide, but implementing something that is actually better than nothing is non-trivial.