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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

#101

Post by danw1979 »

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…

I can see the value in a _choice_ between billing limits and billing alerts, for those customers who don’t want their resources ever to be forcibly shut down, but you’re right in saying that choice should be front-and-centre during account creation.

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

#102

Post by Frieren »

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…

> This seems like a glaring bug

Amazon earns an easy $1000, it is not a bug but a feature. Even if they think that it is a bug it is going to be pretty low compared to anything else that hits THEIR bottom line.

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

#103

Post by Havoc »

Some student / beginner trying to learn and then getting smoked by a footgun is a weekly occurrence on the big cloud subreddits.

It's better business to have people beg for mercy and then magnanimously waive fee than to have any discussion about actual hard limits (which would be used by big corps too not just students).

Yes it can be done technically - Azure already has a not loudly advertised account type that is hardcapped. And no billing alerts aren't a solution. Hell you could even do opt-in "yes I understand my data will be deleted" hardcaps.

This is a fixable problem - they just don't want to because a fix would be bad for earnings.

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

#104

Post by lukeramsden »

soup10 wrote: post #85
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…

Spend limits are such an obvious and necessary feature that the only reason they don't have them is shady business practices.

Not really. Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What do you do when people hit their hard spend limits, start shutting down their EC2 instances and deleting their data? I can see the argument that just because its "hard" doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, but it's disingenuous to say they're shady because they don't.

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

#105

Post by userbinator »

Warning: As an aside, this setup creates mid-price r5.large.search OpenSearch instances by default. Nowhere in the boilerplate code or guide is this mentioned. That will run you $134 per month at minimum.

A good rule when working with any sort of cloud service: Everything that can be charged for, will be.

There are plenty of stories of people getting charged massively, and one may wonder whether this has any negative effects on them getting new customers. Unfortunately it's usually not the ones working with it who are the ones making the decision to use AWS or other cloud services, and the ones who are have their minds fully clouded by the propaganda --- I mean marketing.

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

#106

Post by briandear »

Frieren wrote: post #98
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.

You trust the government far too much. Regulated industries always end up costing the consumer more. See: medical care and education for examples.

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

#107

Post by wiether »

hereonout2 wrote: post #33
braza wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 co…

On the other hand, for some serverless services, it makes sense to use AWS instead of self-hosting.

I've deployed multiple Lambda for many years and I have yet to pay anything for them given how _generous_ their free tier is.

Nowadays I must be at around ~100 Lambda executions per day and my billing for Lambda is still $0/month.

To achieve something similar with self-hosting it would require me to have a server running 24/7 just to allow my code running when needed.

So, almost as with everything else in tech (and life in general), the idea is to not see AWS or self-hosting as the best tools for everything. Sometimes AWS is better, sometimes self-hosting is.

Having the freedom to pick the best one in each situation is quite nice!

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

#108

Post by codedokode »

weinzierl wrote: post #76
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…

It's not just AWS. I think there are only two types of cloud providers: The ones like AWS and DigitalOcean that shift the risk to the customer and the ones that offer shady "unlimited" and "unmetered" plans. Neither is what I want. I wish there was a provider with clear and documented limits to allow proper capacity planning while at the same time shifting all the availability risk to the customer but taking on the f…

It seems that automatic billing is something that cloud providers invented. For example, home Internet providers or mobile providers usually use prepaid plans, where they simply stop the service once you ran out of money (but you can connect your card account if you trust them). So you cannot get charged arbitrary amount for home Internet, and for mobile unless you travel.

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

#109

Post by deskr »

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…

> I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps ...

Agree, it isn't fair. I think it's sensible though. When creating anything on AWS I always behave like AWS is an hostile financial institution gone rogue.

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

#110

Post by hnben »

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…

could you set a limit to the credit-card associated with the cloud service? Or would it still create costs after the limit has run out, which they would collect in other ways?
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