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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?

#33

Post by dpeterson »

I opened a service ticket. My ec2 instances have somehow been running for over 950 hours in one month. I can go back and see my instances run for 744 hours (what i'd expect in a month) in previous months. Amazon invented more hours than actually exist in a month for billing purposes. Bezos is a genius! I should have thought of that!

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

#34

Post by rantwasp »

hanoz wrote: post #9

Mine is showing as roughly twice what I'd expect it to be on the billing home page. It looks about right on the cost explorer though. I got an alert for crossing a billing threshold only five hours ago, as expected for this time of the month; now the total is just under double that. It's quite an intriguing error. I'm struggling to imagine how it might have come about.

if i had to guess I would say that some usage data was piped through the billing system twice. Given how may people are experiencing this I hope this will be fixed in a timely manner.

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

#35

Post by userbinator »

gwillen wrote: post #22

I was also seeing a surprising cost of about twice what I expected, but since I rarely use AWS I was assuming I had just calculated it wrong somehow. It's maddeningly difficult to see your usage history of services -- I still can't figure out how to see what my EC2 usage was this month. There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's no…

There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's not even clear that it will include my historical activity when it's ready...

Cost Explorer itself also charges per use. I'm not kidding:

https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/pricing/

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

#36

Post by kaikai »

gwillen wrote: post #22

I was also seeing a surprising cost of about twice what I expected, but since I rarely use AWS I was assuming I had just calculated it wrong somehow. It's maddeningly difficult to see your usage history of services -- I still can't figure out how to see what my EC2 usage was this month. There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's no…

They probably have cost explorer data in a different system and need to index your history before it can be used.

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

#37

Post by donarb »

I just received this email from Amazon on Thursday afternoon, this may be related:

"We are notifying you that we incorrectly issued an early invoice for your September AWS usage on September 18th. As your card was charged successfully for this invoice, we are currently processing a refund for the unexpected charge. The refund generally takes 3-5 business days to be received by your bank and some banks may require additional processing time. Your full monthly usage will be invoiced through our normal billing process on or around the 3rd of October. We will send another notification when your correct September invoice is available. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this error.

There is no action required from you, but if you have any questions, please contact the AWS Customer Service Team by visiting: https://aws.amazon.com/support, and opening a case by selecting 'Create Case'. You can then select ‘Account and Billing Support’ , followed by ’Billing’ for the Service, and ‘Charge Inquiry’ for the Category."

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

#38

Post by cortesoft »

donarb wrote: post #37

I just received this email from Amazon on Thursday afternoon, this may be related: "We are notifying you that we incorrectly issued an early invoice for your September AWS usage on September 18th. As your card was charged successfully for this invoice, we are currently processing a refund for the unexpected charge. The refund generally takes 3-5 business days to be received by your bank and some banks may require add…

Yeah, I got the same email.

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

#39

Post by paulfurtado »

xtracto wrote: post #24
gwillen wrote: post #22

I was also seeing a surprising cost of about twice what I expected, but since I rarely use AWS I was assuming I had just calculated it wrong somehow. It's maddeningly difficult to see your usage history of services -- I still can't figure out how to see what my EC2 usage was this month. There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's no…

AWS usage reporting is utter crap. The only usable data for me has been the actual billing table. But that is only monthly.

You can make it dump monthly billing CSVs to s3 daily. You'll get a new CSV each day that contains the month to date so it gets bigger every day until it resets the next month.
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