But storage costs continue to add up even when you're not accessing them - there's a cost to storage existing which continues to accrue with time.
When there's no budget left, what do you do with those accruing costs for existing storage?
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Storage costs are predictable and slow to accumulate. They are rarely the problem people are trying to address when they set a budget. As I said, storage would optionally continue to be charged at the normal rate, the other option being immediate deletion if you really need a super hard budget cap.
Once you get the alert that your budget is tripped you can go and see what's in storage via the console and delete it, only paying for a few hours of storage for things you don't want.
If the amount of storage that you can use is limited by quota (say 50GB) the problem becomes relatively easier.
You set a quota for 50GB of storage and no more. The server then restricts you by disk quota to that amount of storage.
The cost is then calculated as 1.15USD per month.
So you don't pay more than 1.15 per month.
Compute and transfer (and other things) could be covered by separate similar quotas with a single maximum spend figure at the bottom of the table.
Moreover, once API calls are locked, what next? You can't delete files, and even if you can delete them, you aren't able to retrieve them before deletion... If a platform allows you to do those actions, then it's rife for abuse, and at public cloud scale that ends up being a far, far bigger problem than the occasional blog post that ends up as a refund (because the other blog post is "I got free storage forever with this one weird trick").
It's really not a simple problem because the next action depends on the choice the developer wants to make: do they increase the budget or decrease usage, and no cloud provider wants to make this choice because no matter what the choice is it will be viewed as wrong. The best they can do is provide developers the best insight and tooling to make this choice themselves.
Once API calls are locked you can open the console, disable all the things that caused you to hit your budget, and then raise the budget a bit to get access to the storage APIs again and manage your storage. Or, the console's storage browser should let you browse and delete files as well. And again, there should be an option to delete all storage immediately for a hard cap on your budget if you really want that.
You need separate costed quotas for each type of activity
with a combined total at the bottom.
You could also have a setting in the admin panel as to what the system should do:
[ ] I want to keep going beyond my quotas (but email me)
[ ] Please shutdown my site
If the answer is "you have a dollar limit set of GCS GETs, GCS PUTs, etc." I guess I could see this working, but hot damn that'll be a horrific interface.
The other issue is that many large customers pay different prices, so billing and quota aren't really tied to each other, and it wouldn't be easy to reconcile this.
As for the button... having been on the product side of building this button, there is no right answer: people will say they never got the email (or it went to the wrong inbox, or their dog ate their phone...) or that they never checked the box to "shut down the site" ("I didn't think it would do X that made my app not work").
I'd probably want it grouped by category with a drill down interface for the specifics.
Probably arranged so you can type in a figure at the bottom for monthly expenditure and it would balance out the requirements based on typical use cases.
So enter $50 in the monthly cap figure and it allocates, say, $20 to compute, $20 to transfer operations and API calls, $10 to storage
which you could then fiddle with of course.
I can't offer much on the second point other than to say that unexpected bills annoy me much more than services that stop working.
I've also never worked anywhere with unlimited budgets. (alas)
I can see that there are probably cases where uptime is more important so they would be more annoyed the other way around.