Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

There's a big problem of: There's a huge amount of AWS that even if you configure it "right" - still leaves you with potentially unlimited liability.

Take a simple example of using Cloudfront and S3 together to host a basic website. There's a good well documented way of securing this all "right".

However that doesn't protect you from "slashdotting" - perhaps you put an image on your site and it gets linked from the frontpage of Reddit.

You go from paying a few $/month, to suddenly overnight having potentially hundreds or thousands of dollars of spend because tens of millions of people have viewed your image.

AWS Billing alerts are not going to save you, because once they (eventually, maybe a day or so late) fire, and assuming you immediately see that notification, figure out what it is being accessed, and remove that file (or just turn off the bucket/cloudfront entirely) - the bills could have gone way up.

It gets worse when you're talking about other AWS services.

The whole point being that billing caps, along with billing alerts that are actually timely, are actually necessary.

You shouldn't have to depend on the grace of AWS Customer Service to not force you to decide whether to pay rent, eat, or your massive credit card bill.

> Realistically though, if you can't afford $20, how on earth did you afford a credit card to sign up for AWS in the first place?

The example was $200. And for a lot of people, particularly students and other people new to development - $200 can be a large chunk of money.

Part of the problem is that you go to AWS Conferences and talks, and they talk about how there's all this amazing stuff, and encourage people to sign up and try it out.

What they never do is tell you "Oh, by the way, this demo costs $x/hour". I'd love to see some kind of taxi-meter style box behind the presenter/in the corner of webcasts showing how much the AWS Bill would be for the demo.

I don’t get the point that AWS docs are free. I mean, they are free, but the services are not. Do you pay for a visit in a car dealership?

Not when you're being simswapped

But there isn’t a lot of middle ground between distributed, strongly-consistent credit limit checks every API call and billing increment (which is, IIRC, instance-seconds or smaller for some time-based services) and a hard billing cap that is actually usable on a system structured like AWS. Partial solutions reduce the risk but don’t eliminate the problem, and at AWS scale reducing the risk means you still have significant numbers of people reliant on the “call customer service” mitigation, and how much spending and system compromise to narrow this billing issue is worthwhile if you are still in that position?

What I'm going to say next should not be taken to detract from that in any way.

(And I know you don't want to hear it, and I could just save everyone some trouble and not say it. But I'm going to say it.)

When I read this:

> please help I made a ticket and called support but i really need to make sure this is dead please Im 20 i really dont have $200 for them please help

I honestly did a double take when I got to the "20". If you'd put a blank in there and asked me to fill it, I would have said "13". I'm still not 100% sure that the blogger didn't alter the age to obfuscate personal details.

I don't mean to single out this person as especially immature, quite the opposite: the interesting thing is that they assume that a 20 year old is obviously a smol bean who could not possibly be expected to figure out AWS billing or come up with $200, _and we agree_. The notion didn't stand out as surprising to the blogger, or to any of the other commenters on HN so far.

I'm not saying they're wrong! I just find this a remarkable signal of how far we, as a culture, have gone in extending childhood well into college age.