Why every Eigon environment has a hard spending cap

Search for "Vercel surprise bill", "Netlify $100k", or "Firebase huge bill" on any social network and you will find the same story over and over: a developer ships a side project, the project gets hit with bot traffic or unexpected scale, and the platform happily bills them for every megabyte. No cap, no warning, just an invoice that makes their stomach drop.

We are not naming any specific person here because we have not asked them for permission to. The pattern is what matters, and the pattern is everywhere. Founders who shipped on a Friday night and woke up to a viral moment that cost more than their rent. Indie hackers who tried to scale a hobby project and came home to a five figure bill from a platform that was supposed to be cheap.

Every modern PaaS has this problem. It is not a bug, it is how the pricing works. You pay per request, per gigabyte, per millisecond of compute. The system is designed to scale linearly with usage, which is great when usage is normal and catastrophic when it is not.

The "just enable spending caps" lie

Vercel will tell you they have spending caps. Technically true. But they are opt in, not on by default. You have to know the feature exists. You have to find it in settings. You have to set a value. And if you forget, your bill scales without limit.

This is the same pattern as "you should have backups" and "you should have 2FA". Defaults matter. Anything that is opt in is, in practice, opt out for the people who need it most.

What we do differently

Every Eigon environment has a hard monthly cost cap. Not a setting. Not a feature. A default.

• 50 percent of cap: a friendly email that just says you are on track.
• 80 percent of cap: a warning email telling you when you will hit your limit at the current rate.
• 95 percent of cap: an urgent email and a banner across your dashboard.
• 100 percent of cap: graceful degradation. We scale your services down to the minimum, disable autoscaling and pause new deploys. Existing traffic still gets served, but no new resources spin up.

One click in the dashboard says "raise my cap by 50 percent" if you actually want to spend more. You are always in control. You just have to actively say yes, instead of finding out from a $5,000 invoice on Monday morning.

DDoS attacks are a feature, not a bug, in our pricing

Eigon includes a Web Application Firewall on every production environment by default. We block common bot patterns at the edge before they reach your app. Bandwidth from blocked traffic does not count against your cap.

If a DDoS attack still gets through, the cap kicks in. Your bill stops at the limit you set. The attacker does not get to bankrupt you.

The trade offs

Hard caps mean you cannot handle a viral moment without intervention. If your blog post hits the front page of Hacker News and you are at 100 percent of your cap, Eigon will throttle to keep your bill safe, but your traffic might queue or rate limit.

We think this is the right trade off. You would rather your site be slow for an hour than wake up to a bill you cannot pay. When you see the urgent alert you click "raise my cap" and you are back at full capacity in seconds.

The whole point is that you decide. Not the platform. Not the bill collector.

Try it

Hard spending caps are on by default for every new environment on every plan. If you have ever had a surprise cloud bill, give us a try. We built this for you. Questions? Email info@eigon.io.