The AWS unexpected bills service has competition.
AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
11–20 of 184 posts
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#12Is this for Tax benefits? Where you could put in all your annual net profits for AWS credit?
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#13What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...
For companies operating on a cash basis with a standard Jan-Dec fiscal calendar (e.g. most small businesses), this would allow you to deduct future spending by prepurchasing AWS credits. It locks away whatever money you dedicate to it but that’d be peanuts compared to paying income tax on it in order to carry it forward as retained earnings.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#14I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
Just use the free tier? You’re notified when you’re approaching the free limit.
AWS, anecdotally, has removed 5k++ mistakes I’ve made with little question.
(One example they forgave due to my carelessness: ECS and Fargate service with logging to CloudWatch but with verbose logging on. The bill was 8k that month for just CloudWatch usage)
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#15Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#16I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
Just use the free tier? You’re notified when you’re approaching the free limit. AWS, anecdotally, has removed 5k++ mistakes I’ve made with little question. (One example they forgave due to my carelessness: ECS and Fargate service with logging to CloudWatch but with verbose logging on. The bill was 8k that month for just CloudWatch usage)
I have only asked for one refund, which was clearly the result of a bug on Amazon's part, and they haggled the whole way. They were quick to a 50% refund and slow to a 100% refund.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#17I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#18I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.
You will still owe the incurred charges and AWS can send it to collections.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#19I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.
That doesn't make much sense. You would still be on the hook for the eventual bill. This sounds like a showerthought hashtag lifehack.
Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance
#20I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
> I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line
Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we can do this for people who don't use infra-as-code in https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 but it's not clear what the workflow could look like for them. Perhaps having separate AWS accounts with a budget alert that emails you to run https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke is a work-around just now.
(I'm co-founder of Infracost)