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

elliott-king.github.io

31–40 of 293 posts

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

#31
post #4

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

I've only ever self-hosted. Granted, I'm only running a website with a few visitors, but I'm just using a cheap raspi, and not spending loads every months for AWS or whatever else people use these days. Plus, its right in my cupboard, and I have full control over it

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

#32
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…

Is there even a simple way of listing all the existing resources in an AWS account? I’ve always had to check service by service, region by region. It’s tedious and error-prone.

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

#33
post #14
post #4

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

> ever since I learnt self-hosting, it feels so liberating +1 Last year I went to self-hosting and I felt the same. I paid less than USD 2000 for a small laptop that I use as a server plus a home NAS and by my current utilization I got in 3 months the return plus the ownership and flexibility.

I'm old and was self hosting 20 years ago, but we're comparing apples to oranges a bit here!

Using AWS for smaller personal projects will always be more expensive and probably less fun.

On the other hand I recently had to run an ML model over hundreds of thousands of media files. I used AWS to launch 100s of GPUs using spot instances and complete the job in a few hours, then just turned it all off and moved on. It cost a few hundred dollars total.

In my mind it's at this kind of scale AWS really makes sense.

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

#34
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…

> do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources

That's the thing that annoys me the most about AWS. There's no easy way to find out all the resources I'm currently paying for (or if there's a way, I couldn't find it).

Without an easy to understand overview, it feels like I don't have full control of my own account.

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

#35
post #34
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…

> do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources That's the thing that annoys me the most about AWS. There's no easy way to find out all the resources I'm currently paying for (or if there's a way, I couldn't find it). Without an easy to understand overview, it feels like I don't have full control of my own account.

Yes i was charged $400 once for services i had running for three months without any idea it was happening

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

#36
post #8

> Even if you are not using Amplify/OpenSearch, I recommend getting familiar with AWS budgets. > It’s so difficult to be paranoid about every single technology you use. I do not know what others feel but with this kind of frictionless setup, plus low intuitivity in the UX/UI of those services, people are not concerned about setting up a credit card, and billing bundling between services (e.g. AWS batch + Lambda + EC2…

I feel so to. The cloud billing model shifts responsibility to users under the guise of "flexibility" and "customization". Imagine a car rental company that charges you by the millisecond for every component - engine camshaft revolutions, tire rotations, windshield wiper activations, seat heating time and so on, but has the ability to set up alerts for each component so that customers "control" their usage and budget…

The alternative is charging for the rental by the day but a huge proportion of your customers (who probably own a bmw) constantly complain that they’re being overcharged and they want a discount cause they don’t need the blinkers, and refuse to pay for them.

I joke, but this persona is very real, and it leads you to this nickel and dime billing model.

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

#37
unrelated rant, but I'm still salty about it.

needed to send "raw" http requests instead of using their bloated sdk for reasons, and requests failed with "content-type: application/json" header, but succeeded with "content-type: application/x-amz-json-1.0". get out of here with that nonsense.

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

#38

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…

A Cloud Guru / Pluralsight has something they call "Cloud Playground" or "sandboxes".

It might provide that, but I’ve never tried it myself, so I could be wrong.

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

#39
post #34
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…

> do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources That's the thing that annoys me the most about AWS. There's no easy way to find out all the resources I'm currently paying for (or if there's a way, I couldn't find it). Without an easy to understand overview, it feels like I don't have full control of my own account.

The billing department knows exactly what you were running, but they only tell you once a month...

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

#40

"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…

It's already ridiculous that the contracts are always one-sided. It is not a consumer service after all.
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