Sinclair effect in action: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Obviously, cloud providers are capable of billing. It's not unreasonable to expect them to offer, at minimum, "Look, we're not evaluating billing continuously but we might, at our option, try to shut down your services after $X and won't bill you excess of $Y" as a (optional) hard contractual term. Having a larger, well-capitalized party absorb risk on behalf of a smaller party for a fee is a business model humans know how to price. It's just not the desired "product".
Note that this doesn't even per se require any technical artifact to implement, just very primitive metering and lush margins.
Seriously question: have you thought through what billing for bandwidth, storage, compute, and services actually entails? I'm having a bit of a reaction to the word "obviously" there.
Obviously, cloud providers are capable of billing. It's not unreasonable to expect them to offer, at minimum, "Look, we're not evaluating billing continuously but we might, at our option, try to shut down your services after $X and won't bill you excess of $Y" as a (optional) hard contractual term. Having a larger, well-capitalized party absorb risk on behalf of a smaller party for a fee is a business model humans know how to price. It's just not the desired "product".
Note that this doesn't even per se require any technical artifact to implement, just very primitive metering and lush margins.