Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt • Hacker News Board

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#11

Post by gpm » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:41 AM UTC

version_five wrote: post #3

I had an AWS account that charged me like $6 per month for a year after I thought I had turned everything off. I finally went on a hunt for what was causing it, and had to escalate to support to find it. This was 11/12 my fault I admit, I should have been on it after the first month. More recently, I was looking for a cloud GPU provider, and tried a different provider that I won't name. I tried out a ~$3 per hour ins…

> [Vague description of provider now removed]

Hinting at the name like this seems unfair to any other companies that might reasonably be interpreted as "[Vague description of provider now removed]"... especially since I can't decide if you're sarcastic about [piece of description] part.

At the very least [two names] are big names that you could plausibly be referring too... and I could see only one name coming into many peoples minds and then them assuming you're referring to that provider.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#12

Post by arthurcolle » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

jacobrussell wrote: post #10

totetsu wrote: post #4

is there an IAC template somewhere that resets an aws account to 0 and deletes everything? I know this articles point is this shouldn't be possible, but as long as it is, there should be a simple measure, that could be linked in tutorials for stopping ongoing charges.

https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke

I found this really hard to use. Asking for configuration credentials that I had no idea how to retrieve

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#13

Post by harry8 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

eric4smith wrote: post #6

Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing…

>DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt.

Wuuuttt? Fraud is what.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#14

Post by WORMS_EAT_WORMS » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

If you delete your AWS account you will still be charged if you don’t remove / terminate some of your services for up to 90 days!

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/close...

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#15

Post by Johnny555 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

As a personal user, I wish they gave two options to fix this.

Option 1:

When credit balance reaches a certain level (or monthly spend reaches a certain level), initiate a resource stop on every resource that can be stopped without data loss. This would still incur charges for some things like EBS volumes, S3 data, etc, but at least it would slow the bleeding.

Option 2:

I don't care about data loss, just terminate everything when I hit the threshold. This should require a double-opt in and maybe a warning banner in the console UI.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#16

Post by throwawaaarrgh » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

Oh come on. We all know that the 'accidental revenue' from the way Free Tier is set up probably makes up a cool 2 million or more annually. Plenty to justify its continued abuse of naive students. Why would they walk away from that cash? The only people they're pissing off is people who aren't using AWS anyway.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#17

Post by aprdm » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

I really recommend using something like Linode for cheap throwaway, might be a bit more expensive (i.e: 5 per month), but the surprise factor disappears..

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#18

Post by asdev » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

unfortunately for most cloud providers, you have to read through pricing very carefully and be even more careful with what you deploy. an infinite loop could lead to $$$$ in charges and billing alerts just alert you, they don't actually shut anything off

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#19

Post by HomeDeLaPot » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:48 AM UTC

Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#20

Post by eric4smith » Wed, May 05, 2021, 12:49 AM UTC

harry8 wrote: post #13

eric4smith wrote: post #6

Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing…

>DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt. Wuuuttt? Fraud is what.

I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down.

Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.