It would be nice if cloud offerings like Hetzner would allow one to set the contract duration and pay in advance, for example, one year. And once that year passes, you could tell them to extend it for another year, or do nothing and get your server deleted. This way you have a control over your spending and avoid surprises. I guess some providers (OVH?) allow you to do that, but of course it requires that all costs be fixed and have no "extras" for bandwidth consumption or things like that.
You can buy credits using a bank transfer [1]. You can also set E-Mail alerts in case your monthly invoice is higher then expected (more traffic etc.) [2]. However, there is no auto-delete as far as I can tell.
Didn't know you could buy credits, but well, for me the key is that no debt is generated when your credit goes to zero. In this case, if you exhaust your credit but your server keeps running, Hetzner will not stop it and will send you the bill next month. Yes, you may have received an email warning but it does not give the same peace of mind.
I’ve been waiting for Hetzner to allow adding credits into one’s account using credit cards or debit cards (or other modes like PayPal). Being outside Germany (and the EU), a bank transfer is not possible or is difficult and prohibitively expensive.
Hetzner also didn’t seem to support credits across all its services when I checked a few years ago.
You can use a bank like Wise which lets you have accounts in many currencies for such bank transfers. Fees between their accounts are quite competitive (I used them many times in the past).
I agree it's not as bad as other companies (like the other day Netlify story) but Hetzner doesn't allow you to set limits either, so in theory you can still be charged without knowing how much it'll be in advance. You can also leave something on while thinking it's off and, yes, it's your fault too, but it wouldn't happen if it just consumed your credits and no more.
At least with the dedicated servers there are no surprises. Monthly cost is fixed, if you exceed the bandwidth limit you'll be throttled. Maybe their cloud offerings offer the same?
From what I can see in their webpage, they charge something like 1 eur for every extra TB but apparently there's no way to set a limit (so you can be protected in the event of a DDoS), only an alert.
