I once had a cloud computing class and a lot of it was based on the AWS free tier. The number of students who got dinged and needed the professor to pull strings was... too many.
Came here to say the exact same.
Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
41–50 of 457 posts
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#42Yup. 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…
Honestly I get lost inside of AWS. Only recently was I able to figure out why I was getting charged $.82/month which, in the long run, is really nothing. But it's amazing how hard it was to figure out why I was getting charged for something that I originally thought was just going to be free.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#43AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.
Azure does this a little better, but best would be to see a breakdown on the invoice with links directly back to the resource.
Maybe there are discounts or other processing that makes this hard.
Or, less charitably, this would lead to people optimising their costs a lot better and canceling unused services much sooner.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [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 m…
I edited my comment if you want to edit yours.
Edited :)
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#45Is 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.
You can set price alerts to email you on the day when you cross a monthly spending limit, but it is not the simplest thing to figure out. I run a small server and have a few odds and ends and get emails at $5, $15, $50, $75, and $100. Haven't broken $75 limit yet...
The problem is that a billing alert at $10 won't prevent you from accidentally starting up something that will bring you a $1000 bill before you can react to that email - there needs to be a process that cuts off service at some hard limit instead of just sending an email and continuing to spend money.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#46Yup. 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.
Did you look at the PDF invoice in the Billing section? I have never seen an invoice where the line items didn't add up to the amount charged to my credit card. If there's just $2.40 on there with no explanation, I'd open a support ticket to complain.
(While looking into this, I was surprised at how minimal DO invoices are, however. For GCP, I'm used to seeing on the order of a million line items per month. Seeing only 3 on my DO invoice was surprising, and could definitely lead to a case where something isn't accounted for correctly. But, I bet support will fix it up for you.)
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#47Oh 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.
This ain't it.
Obfuscated billing helps Amazon with $350/hour engineers, where an engineer figuring out where $10k is going each year isn't a top priority. Been there, done that.
Obfuscated billing is definitely not there to hit free tier or poor folks. AWS has an awesome reputation for just about everything, and it isn't worth the reputation hit. Free tier is there so that:
* the student in college will pick AWS in their first job
* the random engineer will prototype something on the weekend, and Amazon gets millions of business
* the random pre-funding startup starts building on AWS, and if it goes big, so does the account
And it works. Amazon has made millions based on things I've built on free tier. AWS' problem is that my ONE YEAR free tier ran out probably around a decade ago, and I've long since moved on from what I was doing then. If AWS were to continue to provide me a free tier, the same thing would have happened a few times since.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#48Yup. 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…
Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#49Yup. 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…
Yeah but it shows they are reasonable and flexible if a customer makes a mistake. The reason Google Cloud is third, people remember how they were treated when they used Google for Work or whatever its called now.
> But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time".
Is better then if they said: "We reminded you about the consequences of not deleting, we have done nothing wrong."
Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt
#50Is 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.
Of course there's a way. But it's opt-in, not opt-out.
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