Comment by AnthonyMouse

> You said that no fixed response -whether that is allow unexpected billing to increase without limit upon a surge vs serving error pages- will be accepted by the clientele, because some want it one way and others want it the other way.

No, it's because people dislike both of those things and don't want either one of them, and frequently fail to realize ahead of time that choosing between them is even necessary and then get upset by whichever one actually happens.

> Why would you force a single shoe size onto a population?

Here's my original post:

> The main thing Google is screwing up here is not giving you the choice between them.

> And it doesn't have to be just those 2 options

We're talking about an API used by programmers. You don't need them to give you any of that, all you need is for the API to tell you what your current usage is -- and even that is only necessary if something other than your own code is racking up usage. When you're the one making queries and the price of each one is known ahead of time or available via the API, you can already implement any of that logic yourself.