I can't see any features listed that enable me to control costs to prevent surprise bills. If a site got submitted to HN and hugged to not-to-death-because-it-autoscales then I'd wake up to a bunch of alerts and massive outbound bandwidth bill. I don't want that. I want something that stops that happening.
If the App Platform doesn't have that feature, and it isn't planned, that's OK but I'd argue that isn't really preventing a surprise bill as the marketing site claims. A warning isn't quite the same as prevention.
This is exactly the sort of thing I'm talking about, but for money rather than computing resources or bandwidth. I'd like a feature that where the requirement is effectively "Fall back to a serving sorry-I'm-poor.html instead of the app if the total monthly bill has exceeded $xxx". For a side project I'm more interested in not paying an unexpected bill than getting traffic.
I think for most companies, it's better to set the expectation that the service costs money, bursts will cost more money, and then forgive outlier charges once or twice. It's tremendously difficult to compete against the AWS's of the world, putting work into features specifically to minimize how much people spend seems like a good way to fail a company.
I may not underestand parent, but it sounds like its not equivalent to a button next to the auto-scale but more like an email and pre-requisite knowledge that it exists?
We were concerned about spending time on marginal features that didn't actually matter much to people, so we "launched" it without building it to see if anyone cared.
So you could perhaps also consider that if it is only marketed when you sign up and not a clearly defined feature some people (like me) will just never sign up at all.
Not even considering something like AWS with a bazillion types of services, say you have a cloud hosting service that runs nothing but auto-scaling clusters of servers billed by the hour. So I set a cap on costs but not cap on scaling up and turn it loose. It gets a hug of death from something, scales to the sky, does serve all of that traffic fine, but burns through my monthly cost cap in an hour. Oops, now it's down entirely for the next 3 weeks or whatever. Does anybody in the world who's willing to pay for hosting something actually want that? I have to doubt it.
On the other hand, capping the scaling size by number of hosts sounds pretty reasonable. Set a cap at say 2x your normal peak traffic. You get a hug from something, it hits the cap. Most of your extra traffic gets errors or really slow responses, but your service stays up, even when the traffic dies down. Your monthly costs are a bit higher than usual, but manageable. That sounds like a much better result to me.
That doesn't even get into stuff like, oh hey we dropped your DB server because you hit your cost cap early and it costs money to keep it running and to create a new backup too, hope you don't miss that data too much!