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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

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

#191

Post by paranoidrobot »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #168
hannofcart wrote: post #167

> ...an updated free tier that treats “personal learning” AWS accounts differently from “new corporate” accounts, and sets hard billing limits that you can’t exceed. Honestly, this is needed for corporate accounts as well. Not all companies are FAANG scale behemoths who can shrug off an unexpected charge. For a scrappy startup in India, an unexpected $5000 bill would be an existential threat.

A scrappy startup in India is not AWS' ICP.

A scrappy startup in could see an unexpected $5k bill as business-ending.

It's so absurdly easy to run up massive bills, and there's few controls, and practically useless alerting - so you can't rely on that.

Someone spun up a 3 node m5.xlarge RDS Cluster with SQL Server Standard? I hope you notice quickly, 'cause that's going to be >$5k/month.

They don't show a minimum monthly cost for any of these things, either.

No, you're assumed to be okay with unlimited charges, and are left to your own devices to figure it out.

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

#192

Post by nathanaldensr »

StratusBen wrote: post #184
artichokeheart wrote: post #24

AWS 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.

Disclosure: I'm the Co-Founder of Vantage. This is exactly what we do with Vantage: http://vantage.sh/ We give point-in-time run-rates of all active resources based off of the region and resource/service configuration. In addition we try to simplify people's understanding of where their costs are coming from. If anyone needs help with this, they can personally reach out to me at ben@vantage.sh

With all due respect, I think the issue here is that your company should not need to exist. Amazon should provide this feature as part of the UX.

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

#193

Post by jacobsimon »

Just speaking from personal anecdotes, every time I’ve accidentally been charged for something on AWS that I didn’t intend, their support team has refunded me without much hassle. Things may have changed in recent times but I’ve found them to be pretty reasonable about it.

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

#194

Post by bckr »

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…

Ugh. I'm so glad my first owie was "only" $200. Hurt a lot at the time, though. I could still use that back...

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

#195

Post by eli »

dotproto wrote: post #89
paaakthecaaa wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actio…

"They already win on UX" As someone that has tried and failed to get some small personal sites running on AWS a couple times, I'm going to have to tag this snippet with [citation needed].

It’s not you. It’s pretty rough for new users.

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

#196

Post by jenniferli23 »

nathanaldensr wrote: post #192
StratusBen wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclosure: I'm the Co-Founder of Vantage. This is exactly what we do with Vantage: http://vantage.sh/ We give point-in-time run-rates of all active resources based off of the region and resource/service configuration. In addition we try to simplify people's understanding of where their costs are coming from. If anyone needs help with this, they can personally reach out to me at ben@vantage.sh

With all due respect, I think the issue here is that your company should not need to exist. Amazon should provide this feature as part of the UX.

Yea they should, but if it doesn't, are you gonna keep waiting or do something about it?

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

#199

Post by darthrupert »

The author starts eith comparing a $200 buck charge that AWS support roller back to somebody losing or imagining to lose $100K in trading. Wild juxtapositions there.

After seeing how recklessly people use AWS when it's not their own wallet on the line, I'll wager to say that this 20-year old learned a valuablr lesson.

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