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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

#141

Post by [deleted] »

ivan_gammel wrote: post #113
briandear wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

One of the most American things you’ll ever hear. No, regulation doesn’t cost more. In Germany education is essentially free (yes, I know, we pay it from taxes — it costs German taxpayers less than it costs American students). Healthcare kind of the same: we pay for insurance and then only occasionally have co-payments for extras, but costs again are much lower than in USA.

[deleted]

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

#142

Post by raverbashing »

slyall wrote: post #129
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…

Dear Customer, You have reached your Configured Maximum Monthly Spend Limit. As per your settings we have removed all objects from S3, All RDS Databases, All Route53 Domains, all ESB volumes, all elastic IPs, All EC2 instances and all Snapshots. Please update your spend limit before you recreate the above. Yours, AWS

Nowhere (serious) does billing limits work like this

There's always a dunning period and multiple alerts

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

#143

Post by spacebanana7 »

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…

Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application.

Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen.

Hard spend limits might make sense for indie / SME focused cloud vendors though.

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

#144

Post by Xelbair »

briandear wrote: post #106
Frieren wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

what?

Governments have a systematic pressure, at least in sane countries, to be at least partially responsible towards customers - their citizens and voters.

Corporations do not. especially in businesses with high barriers to entry, and where they can vendor lock you.

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

#145

Post by throw2343223434 »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #143
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…

Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application. Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen. Hard spend limits might make sense f…

But the presence of a feature does not mean it has to be used?

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

#146

Post by jclulow »

codedokode wrote: post #108
weinzierl wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is that true? All of my Internet and mobile telephone service is post-paid with automatic billing. I know one can get prepaid plans from some providers, but how are you arriving at "usually"?

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

#147

Post by OtomotO »

briandear wrote: post #106
Frieren wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I trust the government in a democracy more than I trust a corporation, yes.

Do I absolutely trust each government in every democracy to make the right decisions for any problem? Of course not!

But I still trust them way more than corporations or the "invisible hand of the market"

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

#148

Post by lucianbr »

lukeramsden wrote: post #104
soup10 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale?

What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too.

So many smart engineers with high salaries and they can't figure out a solution like "shut down instances so costs don't continue to grow, but keep the data so nothing critical is lost, at least for a limited time"?

Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's a hard problem, they can't be expected to even try to solve it.

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

#149

Post by rwmj »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #143
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…

Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application. Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen. Hard spend limits might make sense f…

Cool, have an "I know what I'm doing, opt me out!" button.

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

#150

Post by herculity275 »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #143
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…

Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application. Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen. Hard spend limits might make sense f…

> Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen.

"Hazardous" feels like the wrong word here - if your customer decides to enact a spend limit it should not be up to you to decide whether that's good for them or not.

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