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I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

elliott-king.github.io

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Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#21

Post by mrintegrity »

forgotoldacc wrote: post #13

I've been putting off digging into AWS for years now, and it's because of stories like these. There really should be a standardized training course that requires no credit card info and lets people experiment for free. Instead they have some pencil pushers calculating that they can milk thousands here and there from "user mistakes" that can't be easily disputed, if at all. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been…

>Instead they have some pencil pushers calculating that they can milk thousands here and there from "user mistakes" that can't be easily disputed

User mistakes of this type must be a drop in the bucket for AWS and in my experience they seem more keen to avoid such issues that can cost more in damaged reputation.

AWS is not cheap, and in some cases it's incredibly expensive (egress fees), but tricking their customers into accidentally spending a couple of hundred extra is not part of their playbook.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#22

Post by braza »

themanmaran wrote: post #9

Par for the course for AWS. I tried following their quickstart Sagemaker guide to run Llama 2 a few months back. And it certainly spins up quick, but next day I realize it's running me $400/day. I was able to get the charges reversed, but definitely learned not to trust their guides.

Sagemaker is one of the biggest bummers in terms of product and is a clear case of enshittification.

When the product was starting (2017/2018) the whole setup was quite straightforward: Notebook instances, Inferences, REST APIs for servicing. Some EFS on top and clear that the service centered around S3. And of course, closed price without any surprises.

Was a kind Digital Ocean vibe the whole experience, and a Data Scientist with a rudimentary knowledge and curiosity around infrastructure could setup something affordable, predictable, and simple.

Today we have Wrangler, Feature Store, and RStudio, the console for the notebooks has an awful UX, and several services are under the hood moving data around (and billing for that).

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#23

Post by hnlmorg »

davedx wrote: post #10

This seems like a glaring bug in the scripts run by that `npx` command. The author is correct, the scripts should 100%: - Choose the lowest cost resource (it's a tutorial!) - Cleanup resources when the `delete` subscript is run I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources after running something like this. If a startup had this behavior wou…

AWS docs are terrible. Half the time their code examples are flat out wrong.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#24

Post by somat »

It is unfortunate that most of these services don't have a pre pay tier.

On the one hand I get that if your business depends on such a service you don't want it to suddenly go down. But on the other hand there is almost never a hard mechanism to limit your risk. Or if there is, it is opt-in. The conspiracist in me says this is working exactly as planned for AWS as they have no financial incentive to limit customer risk.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#25

Post by tankenmate »

icemelt8 wrote: post #4

ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating

for our businesses self hosting we avoid all the bells and whistles extras on platforms like AWS as the billing adds up very very quickly. And besides there are a number of providers that don't have all the bells and whistles of AWS (which we don't use) that are quite frankly 25% of the cost of AWS.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#27

Post by braza »

rvba wrote: post #15

Let's say 25% of people dont argue with customer service for a chargeback. Best run company in the world /s

It's a Tim foil hat pet conspiracy that I have, but I strongly believe that part important of the business model (or revenue share) is from people making mistakes or forgetting resources; more or less like gym subscriptions where the gym owners are more than happy to sell the [maximum_amount_of _people + 40%] knowing that the absenteeism will give the revenue offset that sustain part of the business.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#28

Post by bdcravens »

etothepii wrote: post #19
forgotoldacc wrote: post #13

I've been putting off digging into AWS for years now, and it's because of stories like these. There really should be a standardized training course that requires no credit card info and lets people experiment for free. Instead they have some pencil pushers calculating that they can milk thousands here and there from "user mistakes" that can't be easily disputed, if at all. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been…

It is very unusual for AWS not to issue refunds in situations like this, so I don't think it's a function of them finding an edge to milk thousands from user mistakes. More likely they've found that issuing refunds is less onerous than it would be to provide accurate and cheap tutorials. Perhaps that does not excuse the behaviour but AWS reversed a $600 charge I incurred using AWS Textract where the charges were comp…

I accidentally pushed an AWS key to a public repo, and by the next day, had like $50k in charges from crypto miners. AWS reversed the charges, with the only condition that we enable some basic security guardrails that I should have had in place to begin with.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#29

Post by EdwardDiego »

baq wrote: post #17
EduardoBautista wrote: post #12

Maybe official AWS guides should include a tutorial to set billing alerts and limits as a prerequisite to many of their guides.

Maybe AWS could develop the feature that everybody asks for - the OOM killer (where OOM stand for 'out of money')

Yeah, but then they can't win "customer service" points by not making you pay outright extortionate rates, thus further inducing lock-in.

It's very clever - either people pay the overages, or contact you and you can look good by giving them company scrip to spend on other of your services.

Re: I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

#30

Post by modernerd »

"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding.

Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for my house", the less they'll want to explore your offerings.

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