Hard budget caps are readily available in Europe.

And everywhere in Europe you have clear price sheets (unlike the deliberately opaque mess of the US price sheets with more small-print than a packet of pills), which means even if you are at an EU provider with no hard caps you can still accurately reason and predict your costs.

Just a few examples....

Cloud providers:

    - Upcloud
    - Exoscale

Inference providers:

    - Verda
    - PrivateMode

I really don't buy the stories the US providers tell you that "its too difficult" or "what if you suddenly go viral".

The "viral" bit is easily solved through basic monitoring of metrics that everybody should be doing. I believe the cool-kids give it the fancy name of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). All you need to do is top-up your balance / adjust your cap if your metrics are trending upwards for an explainable reason. Its not rocket science.

As for the "too difficult" that's just a lie. It just suits the US cloud providers better to have you spend spend spend on their messy soup of random interdependent microservices.