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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

#181

Post by concerndc1tizen »

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…

This guy is a straight shooter with upper management written all over him.

(Office Space)

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

#182

Post by Aeolun »

codedokode wrote: post #115
lukeramsden wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You shut down their instances and keep the data for a week and delete it if they don't pay promptly. It's not very profitable though.

That’s what Hetzner does.

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

#183

Post by CJefferson »

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 hear people say that all the time, but it's not my experience.

I once ran up a bill of $60 accidentally, didn't get a refund. I've had three friends with bills, one got a refund.

It might depend on who you know, if you look like someone who is likely to spend more money in future, how stupid your mistake was, I don't know.

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

#184

Post by concerndc1tizen »

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.

Because they're regulated in their favor, due to lobbying.

The problem is the electorate, and the lack of actual regulation.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

jeroenhd wrote: post #124
urbandw311er wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't you know, Amazon owns JSON? They acquired it this week, please update all your Content-Type headers within 12 months otherwise you will be in violation of their IP holdings.

If they use a non-standard version of JSON (for example, one supporting comments, or one with rules about duplicate keys, or any other rule that's not part of the underspecified JSON spec) they should use a custom content type. Something can be valid JSON but invalid AmazJSON and this is exactly how you would distinguish between the two.

[deleted]

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

#187

Post by londons_explore »

__alexs wrote: post #53
newaccount74 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They tell you in hourly increments for almost everything?

Even hourly isn't good enough. If I shut down some service, I want to know right now that nothing billable is left over. I don't want to have to wait an hour and come back and check only to find I forgot to clean up some IP address.

Why can we not have a "billable items" dashboard which simply shows, globally, a list of all items in your account which are billable, and how much they will cost if left running for 1 more hour/month?

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

#188

Post by larsrc »

elashri wrote: post #3

It is sad experience but I disagree with the author here > It’s so difficult to be paranoid about every single technology you use. I would be paranoid with anything related to AWS, I don't want to risk my bankruptcy (or near bankruptcy experience) on small mistakes or the goodwill of the AWS support.

It's a bad user experience if you have to keep checking for hidden extra costs.

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

#189

Post by jjallen »

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…

So make it an option. That’s not hard.

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

#190

Post by londons_explore »

michaelsalim wrote: post #170
reddalo wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Every so often, I'd get a random bill from AWS totaling to a few cents. No idea where it comes from and it's not worth the non trivial effort to find out about it. Just another reason I avoid AWS unless necessary.

Same here. And I'm worried that one month that bill will suddenly be $20k because whatever was costing a few cents suddenly gets hit by some DDoS attack.

Or that my card will expire and AWS will send that $0.03 bill to collections and slap court fees on and send a bailiff.

Their whole setup seems intended to cause expensive mistakes.

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