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Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

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Re: Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

#11

Post by rumanator »

cameronbrown wrote: post #8
human20190310 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a word for cloud billing anxiety yet? I had an AWS account I wasn't using, but I didn't want to get surprised by any bills, so I set an alert to let me know when the bill was more than $0. Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself. I closed it altogether after that. It's better…

> Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself. They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge for that.

AWS is a gigantic exercise in figuring out how to gouge customers. Case in point: charging API gateways per HTTP request.

Re: Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

#13

Post by sciurus »

rumanator wrote: post #11
cameronbrown wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself. They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge for that.

AWS is a gigantic exercise in figuring out how to gouge customers. Case in point: charging API gateways per HTTP request.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service, and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API gateway (or any load balancer).

Re: Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

#15

Post by rumanator »

sciurus wrote: post #13
rumanator wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is a gigantic exercise in figuring out how to gouge customers. Case in point: charging API gateways per HTTP request.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service, and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API gateway (or any load balancer).

Which other service provider puts a price tag on each HTTP request routed through a reverse proxy?

Some service providers such as Hetzner don't even charge for bandwidth up to 20TB, but somehow AWS found a way to hike the bill per HTTP request.

Re: Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

#17

Post by oldmanhorton »

rumanator wrote: post #15
sciurus wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service, and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API gateway (or any load balancer).

Which other service provider puts a price tag on each HTTP request routed through a reverse proxy? Some service providers such as Hetzner don't even charge for bandwidth up to 20TB, but somehow AWS found a way to hike the bill per HTTP request.

I've never used AWS so perhaps I'm mistaken, but api gateways normally provide extra functionality on top of just proxying the request. You can still set up a server listening on port 80 or 443 with a public IP and make requests to it without being charged per request.

Re: Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

#19

Post by Johnny555 »

rumanator wrote: post #11
cameronbrown wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself. They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge for that.

AWS is a gigantic exercise in figuring out how to gouge customers. Case in point: charging API gateways per HTTP request.

Charging per request for something that has a cost to provide is reasonable (and it's a tiny charge in this case, $3.50/million or 0.00035 cents per request).

Otherwise there's no incentive for application developers to optimize their usage.

In my last company we charged per unit of work, but it was possible to send a lot of requests to do a tiny amount of work -- some customers hammered us with millions of requests to do each unit of work. It wasn't malicious and it worked with their workflow, but we lost money on those customers due to all of the infrastructure required for the request routing.

The company eventually started charging a nominal fee per request, which resolved the issue.

Re: Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?

#20

Post by lolinder »

captkos wrote: post #16

Yeah something is crazy.. I killed a bunch of service content and my cost STILL seems to be going up.. My bill for this month (even after the reduction) is going to be almost 85% higher than last month with the same level of activity.

I wouldn't go killing important servers if I were you. I'm showing a bill for 950+ hours for a bunch of services that I only have one instance of each. Since that's not possible (there aren't that many hours in a month), and Cost Explorer has the correct numbers, I'm assuming that there's a mistake that's causing double-counting on the billing dashboard.
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