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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

#221

Post by lutoma »

theanonymousone wrote: post #73
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 also a large barrier to adoption. e.g. for me. I never dared to get my foot wet with AWS, despite interest. Better safe with a cheap, flat-rate VPS than sorry.

Same. I will never touch AWS because the risk of accidentally bankrupting our business due to some small configuration mistake is just way too large.

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

#222

Post by dijksterhuis »

ekidd wrote: post #178
vultour wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By checking what resources you are spinning up and double checking everything has been removed after you're done. I have used AWS for small projects many times and have never been hit with a surprise bill. The platform is built for actual customers, not your hello world app.

Being aware of everything you're running on AWS is trivial when it's all on the EC2 dashboard, and you create everything by hand or using Terraform. Many of these new AWS-provided stacks, however, seem to create stuff all over your account. The moral of the story? Don't ever use AWS tools like the one the OP describes, ones which create a bunch of different resources for you automatically.

> The moral of the story? Don't ever use AWS tools like the one the OP describes, ones which create a bunch of different resources for you automatically.

i use them to create a small test stack to look at it for a day or two.

then go through, delete all of the resources, put what i need into terraform etc.

has worked well for me in the past.

but yeah, i would never blindly use aws tools to magically put something into production.

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

#224

Post by steveBK123 »

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.

We missed the boat on that in the US, better luck in 2028

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

#225

Post by bryancoxwell »

exhilaration wrote: post #212
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 been mentioned several time in HN comments that the AWS billing code is a giant pile of spaghetti and there is generally a lot of fear around making big changes to it. That's been one of the more interesting inside baseball facts I've learned here.

Well done AWS for finding a way to make your technical debt cost other people money.

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

#226

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

oh god , what a timing , I had actually created a blog post on why I didn't want to host a hobby project with credit card because I didn't want to even risk a 0.01% chance of me getting an insane bill and here aws's official guide is causing such things.

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

#227

Post by rmbyrro »

bryancoxwell wrote: post #225
exhilaration wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been mentioned several time in HN comments that the AWS billing code is a giant pile of spaghetti and there is generally a lot of fear around making big changes to it. That's been one of the more interesting inside baseball facts I've learned here.

Well done AWS for finding a way to make your technical debt cost other people money.

[flagged]

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

#228

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

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…

Totally agreed.

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

#229

Post by dcminter »

theanonymousone wrote: post #73
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 also a large barrier to adoption. e.g. for me. I never dared to get my foot wet with AWS, despite interest. Better safe with a cheap, flat-rate VPS than sorry.

I have a personal account that I'm meticulously careful about (but still terrified of).

I also have an account with L̵i̵n̵u̵x̵A̵c̵a̵d̵e̵m̵y̵ A̵C̵l̵o̵u̵d̵G̵u̵r̵u̵ PluralSight: and while the courses are very variable (and mostly exam cramming focused) it has their Cloud Playground as a super nice feature.

I get four hours to play around with setting things up and then it will all get automatically torn down for me. There's no cloud bill, just my subscription (I think that's about $400pa at the moment - can't check right now as annoyingly their stuff is blocked by our corporate network!) It has a few limitations, but none that have been problems for me with exploring stuff so far.

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