Suddenly needing to add a credit card - can I ensure it doesn't get charged?

[jfent]

@pf_moore

My concern was that if something in my app got into an infinite loop, or I had some bug that caused me to write a massive data set to disk, I’d get charged for that rather than the app being prevented from doing it in the first place. If I can ensure by my app settings that this can’t happen, that’s a significant amount of my worries dealt with.

If you created a Fly Volume with e.g. 2GB of space, your app won’t be able to write more than that. Volumes only auto-extend if you set them up to do so, so you don’t have to worry about ballooning usage with them.

@pf_moore

I do note that my builder shows as having a 50GB volume size for “machine data”, and the pricing suggests that up to 3GB is free. Do I need to do something to limit my disk usage to 3GB? Basically everything I have is on the basis of “just use the defaults”, so I don’t really know how to change these sorts of setting.

Ah yeh great point - we could do a much better job of sign-posting that builder resources are free. Anything your builder has/does will cost you nothing. Believe it or not, this has actually been another source of abuse - fraudsters are creative

So no action needed on your end regarding the builder - you only have to worry about resources you specifically provisioned.

@pf_moore

The main question I had was why I was suddenly getting this message, when the credit card requirement clearly wasn’t a new thing (I’ve seen messages dating back a few years) and I hadn’t to my knowledge changed anything in my usage.

Yup totally get that and it’s great feedback. The people dealing with abuse at fly.io have been working furiously recently to prevent fraud from impacting legitimate users, which has included adding new checks. Unfortunately, as always with this stuff, legitimate users like yourself can get caught in that net.

@pf_moore

Thanks for taking the time to explain the details for me.

Thanks, you’re very welcome!