---
title: "Accident Forgiveness"
description: "Public cloud billing can turn accidental deployments, configuration errors, runaway VM allocation, or leaked CI/CD environments into unexpectedly enormous charges, making teams hesitant to experiment. Fly.io announces an initial “Accident Forgiveness” policy: customers with any support contract can request refunds for unexpected charges, almost without questions, while the company reserves the right to cut off abuse. The longer-term goal is an automated billing system with line-item vetoes, but fraud—especially cryptocurrency mining—requires an incremental rollout; the first version uses manual follow-up reminders to investigate incidents. A rebuilt billing system is intended to support future accident protection, including detecting month-over-month spikes, flagging unusual deployments before billing, and identifying opportunities for reserved pricing and backdated reservations."
---

# Accident Forgiveness

[Fly.io](https://yomu.fyi/company/fly-io) · Aug 21, 2024

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Public cloud billing can turn accidental deployments, configuration errors, runaway VM allocation, or leaked CI/CD environments into unexpectedly enormous charges, making teams hesitant to experiment. Fly.io announces an initial “Accident Forgiveness” policy: customers with any support contract can request refunds for unexpected charges, almost without questions, while the company reserves the right to cut off abuse. The longer-term goal is an automated billing system with line-item vetoes, but fraud—especially cryptocurrency mining—requires an incremental rollout; the first version uses manual follow-up reminders to investigate incidents. A rebuilt billing system is intended to support future accident protection, including detecting month-over-month spikes, flagging unusual deployments before billing, and identifying opportunities for reserved pricing and backdated reservations.

## Context

Public cloud resources are elastic and can generate unexpectedly large bills through accidental scale changes, configuration mistakes, runaway deployments, or leaked CI/CD environments. Existing provider concessions are discretionary and slow, while billing alerts were difficult to implement with the previous billing system and may only shift responsibility to the customer.

## Approach / What changed

Fly.io is introducing explicit accident forgiveness incrementally. Customers with any support contract can receive refunds for unexpected charges, subject to the company’s right to stop abuse. For each forgiven bill, manual reminders will prompt investigation, while a rebuilt billing system is intended to enable automated spike detection, unusual-deployment checks, reserved-pricing opportunities, and eventually prevention before charges occur.

## Takeaways

- Customers with a Fly.io support contract at any level can have an unexpected charge refunded, almost without questions.
- An automated line-item veto system is not yet available because open-ended forgiveness could be exploited by cryptocurrency miners and other fraudsters.
- The rebuilt billing system is planned to detect bill spikes and unusual deployments before billing, and to support reserved pricing and backdated reservations.

**Tags:** [Pricing](https://yomu.fyi/topic/pricing), [Public Cloud](https://yomu.fyi/topic/public-cloud)

- Source: [Fly.io](https://fly.io/blog/accident-forgiveness)
- Source URL: https://fly.io/blog/accident-forgiveness
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-02T16:00:51.466Z

[Read original post](https://fly.io/blog/accident-forgiveness)