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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

#91

Post by benterix »

> It’s so difficult to be paranoid about every single technology you use. When using new technologies that promise to speed up the developer flow, I already expect them to be more expensive than bare metal, but I think this is beyond the pale.

It's always been. They are always pushing boundaries and checking what they can get away with. The response "we’ve processed a billing adjustment for the unexpected charges as a one time courtesy." even though it looks like a bug and it hasn't been fixed since is already telling.

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

#92

Post by larsrc »

While I don't like Amazon one but, I appreciate that you don't go into the Evil Big Tech trope. Things at that scale are indeed complicated and hard to coordinate.

That said: fuck, that's expensive and poorly explained! Not doing anything cloud without hard limits!

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

#93

Post by _7acn »

I set up a private account on Azure to host a small, static website using 100% FREE components. However, it wasn't possible to do this without registering a credit card. Even when I tried to add a different card from Revolut, which is a prepaid card, I received a message stating that such cards are not accepted and that it has to be an actual CREDIT card.

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

#95

Post by blitzar »

gwd wrote: post #41
etothepii wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It is very unusual for AWS not to issue refunds in situations like this ...when asked to. But what percentage of mistakes like this end up just being "eaten" by the end-user, not realizing that they can ask for a refund? What percentage don't even get noticed?

This is basically a whole section in the grifters guide to business. Placing small hurdles to refunds via things like asking for one / filling out a form / cashing physical cheques etc will result in not having to give back 100% of the money that you have taken from people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassing_cheque

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

#96

Post by Retric »

chx wrote: post #75
modernerd wrote: post #30

"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…

> the less they'll want to explore your offerings. Honestly? All the better. There are obviously use cases where AWS is the right tool for the job but it's extremely rare. It's coasting on hype and somehow attaining "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" status.

Except people do get fired for choosing AWS and drastically increasing costs or making big mistakes that cost several times their annual salary.

It’s just not the kind of thing you’re going to see in a blog post.

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

#97

Post by danw1979 »

reddalo wrote: post #34
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…

> 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.

> 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

Cost Explorer, in the management account if you’ve got Organization set up.

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

#98

Post by Frieren »

modernerd wrote: post #30

"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…

Regulate it.

Asking Amazon to do something makes little sense. Create laws that force Amazon, and all the rest, to respect their users money. By default, corporations will do what makes them money, not what is ethical or good for the economy.

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

#99

Post by userbinator »

krelian wrote: post #94

Cloud computing is ridiculously expensive. The other day I wanted to increase Mongo Atlas iops by 1000 on a 3 node cluster and it costs $3000 a year. How does that make any sense?

It makes sense in a world where they want to monetise every little thing you do.

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

#100

Post by patrakov »

If the original author reads this comment, I have a question.

One of the problems highlighted was that the documented teardown procedure did not properly delete the OpenSearch domain. Would AWS Nuke (https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke) correctly destroy everything that the tutorial sets up?

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