Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#111

Post by brightball » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 12:28 PM UTC

jsingleton wrote: post #17

markwillis82 wrote: post #8

As a recently new customer to AWS. This service sounds really useful. Quite possibly one of the best pricing pages[1] I've seen in a while too. [1] https://www.s3stat.com/Pricing.aspx

AWS pricing is crazy complicated. I gave a presentation on this a few years ago ( https://speakerdeck.com/jpsingleton/aws-pricing ). It may be a bit out of date by now but I could update it and write it up as a blog post if people are interested?

It really is. Moving from RDS to Aurora was easier because we already had the metric data from AWS that we needed to make calculations. Moving from anywhere else would have been scary.

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#112

Post by marktangotango » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 12:32 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #51

nicky0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a user of S3Stat once. I emailed in about a problem about 4 years ago. Still no reply. I'm not upset at all as it was dirt cheap. But support is not a priority.

Ah, bummer. Sorry to miss a mail, since I do make a point of at least answering them. If you remember what the issue was, and still want to use the service, send me a mail. I'll try to get back to you within a few months this time.

Zing lol

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#113

Post by rocky1138 » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 1:13 PM UTC

jasonkester wrote: post #61

leoalves wrote: post #57

Hey Jason congrats on your product. Really liked your writing style. Very funny and informative. Nice job. Do you worry about amazon releasing something to analyse the logs and killing your business? They just released Amazon QuickSight in beta and I think you will probably be able to import logs from their services. Of course the user will have to create the reports themselves but I guess your audience is tech savvy…

Absolutely. But it's been 10 years now, and the best they've come up with is a sort of stripped down Cloudwatch-style request count graph for Cloudfront usage. That did actually cause a bit of a dip in signups when it came out, but I think there's still a need for more detailed reports. But yeah, the expectation is that they'll squash it dead any minute now. I'm hoping that the next thing I'm building will have repla…

Care to enlighten us on just what that is?

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#114

Post by jrochkind1 » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 2:51 AM UTC

universenz wrote: post #98

jrochkind1 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, i could have been more pleasant, sorry. I am personally offended that someone is using "We had hoped to provide this for free but need to make expenses" as a marketing strategy to make more than expenses. When others really are asking for money just to cover expenses. It may not matter to some people. There's nothing wrong with charging money for providing a service in order to make a good profit. But t…

Just to confirm, do you, yourself, charge an hourly rate for your time? If you do, it is natural to expect that he can ask for both time and materials.

I charge an hourly rate for my time. I don't tell anyone that I had hoped to work for them for free, but it turns out I need to charge just enough to pay for my groceries, while in fact making enough to go on fancy vacations. Because that would be lying. I didn't hope to work for them for free, and I am charging more than just enough to cover my groceries.

I have no problem with him charging whatever price he can get for his service, that's business. I have a problem with marketing it as "We were initially hoping to provide this service free of charge. However, watching our bandwidth usage and server costs as people started using us, it quickly became apparent that we'd need some help to cover our expenses," if that's not true.

What's the reason to say this except marketing, because you think people are going to be more likely to pay if you say this? Does it not strongly imply that the guy is charging just enough to cover bandwidth and server costs? And is that true?

I have no problem with what he's charging, which seems a reasonable price, and really I don't care if it's reasonable or not, people can pay it or not, their choice, I have no problem with people charging prices that seem unreasonable to me, if they are successful at it anyway, good for them.

I have a problem with being misleading about your business model in order to get business, and in particular in pretending you are doing what some people _really are_ doing, but you are not, because you want to undeservedly get the good favor those people those people deservedly get.

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#115

Post by pmontra » Thu, Oct 06, 2016, 10:32 AM UTC

kristianp wrote: post #103

jasonkester wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent timing. I was getting a bit grey-texted out while proofreading it this morning, and actually made the code change on the dev side. But the blog started seeing a dozen requests per second before I could push the change live, and I've been in "nobody touch nothin'!" mode ever since. But I snuck that CSS change in just now.

I think the problem is the font-weight. I wasn't really able to read the page until I changed it from 300 to 400. I don't think anyone should reduce the font-weight of their body text, it just looks too greyed-out.

Some fonts work well only with some specific values of font-weight. Maybe this is the case.

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#116

Post by SZJX » Sat, Oct 08, 2016, 5:09 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #114

universenz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to confirm, do you, yourself, charge an hourly rate for your time? If you do, it is natural to expect that he can ask for both time and materials.

I charge an hourly rate for my time. I don't tell anyone that I had hoped to work for them for free, but it turns out I need to charge just enough to pay for my groceries, while in fact making enough to go on fancy vacations. Because that would be lying. I didn't hope to work for them for free, and I am charging more than just enough to cover my groceries. I have no problem with him charging whatever price he can get…

Exactly. I just don't find the OP's idea that he tries to "spend as little time with customers as possible" and "charges the previous months just because he can" very comfortable at all. A bit too greedy-sounding in a sense.

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#117

Post by jsingleton » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:13 PM UTC

xenophonf wrote: post #77

jsingleton wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, I'll add it to the list and might combine it with some thoughts on vendor lock-in.

Thank you!

Part 1 of 3 is up: https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#118

Post by jsingleton » Tue, Oct 11, 2016, 12:14 PM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #69

jsingleton wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS pricing is crazy complicated. I gave a presentation on this a few years ago ( https://speakerdeck.com/jpsingleton/aws-pricing ). It may be a bit out of date by now but I could update it and write it up as a blog post if people are interested?

Definitely do it. I need someone to explain it too me. Too many ifs ands and buts for it to make sense.

Part 1 of 3 is up: https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#119

Post by xenophonf » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 1:05 PM UTC

jsingleton wrote: post #117

xenophonf wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you!

Part 1 of 3 is up: https://unop.uk/on-aws-vs-azure-vendor-lock-in-and-pricing-c...

I'm not sure but I noticed it linked from somewhere else. Thanks for posting this! I'm looking forward to the additional parts.

Re: Amazon flipped a default and made me thousands of dollars

#120

Post by jrochkind1 » Sat, Oct 15, 2016, 8:29 PM UTC

SZJX wrote: post #116

jrochkind1 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I charge an hourly rate for my time. I don't tell anyone that I had hoped to work for them for free, but it turns out I need to charge just enough to pay for my groceries, while in fact making enough to go on fancy vacations. Because that would be lying. I didn't hope to work for them for free, and I am charging more than just enough to cover my groceries. I have no problem with him charging whatever price he can get…

Exactly. I just don't find the OP's idea that he tries to "spend as little time with customers as possible" and "charges the previous months just because he can" very comfortable at all. A bit too greedy-sounding in a sense.

I mean if it works for your as a business with happy customers, more power to you. We'd certainly all like to work less but still make enough money.

I just don't like it in combination with the marketting suggesting he'd providing this as a public service only charging enough to pay server expenses, when that ain't true.