You deleted everything and AWS is still charging you?

"Here’s the part that actually gets to me as a Developer Advocate. When a student gets a surprise bill, they don’t usually think “I missed a step in my cleanup.” They think “AWS secretly charges you even after you delete stuff.” They tell their classmates and that becomes the narrative. I’ve heard it in person, on discord, etc. “Be careful with AWS, they’ll charge you for nothing.” It’s not cool because it can scare people away from learning skills that would genuinely help their careers."

Maybe it teaches some of them not to stick their hand in lawnmowers.

When I was a student, I had an account at Citizens Bank, which had a branch on-campus. I pretty much never used it: I put some money in at the beginning, occasionally added some; used the ATM from time to time.

At the end of four years, I decided to close my account. There was less money in there than I thought there should be. I demanded an accounting. They happily demonstrated that there was a disclosed-only-in-fine-print fee charged each month that I didn't use the account according to some arcane formula. They wouldn't refund the fee.

So for the thirty or forty years since, I've never used Citizens Bank for anything, even if it would have been convenient. And I discouraged other people from doing so. I imagine I've cost them several thousand times those fees in revenue over the years.

Anyway, this is a story about AWS and their no-good, horrible-by-design billing practices.

I recently dealt with something similar with a CDN I used for a project 3 years ago. They kept charging me $0.01/month after I got all of my content off of their servers. Took months to resolve, luckily was pennies so it wasn't a big deal but very frustrating.

this happened to me. they refunded me after i contacted support!

Agreed. AWS is downright hostile about giving you any idea about what resources you actually have deployed, to the point where it must be deliberately malicious. Even their billing page is terrible for tracing down the root cause of usage with the default configuration.

You have to go into third party tooling if you want any chance of seeing what’s actually going on, especially if there’s any odds of you deploying stuff in another region and even moreso if you have more than 1 account.

At this point, I’d say it should be a best practice of owning 2 AWS accounts, even as a hobbyist: one payer account with a HEAVILY locked down SCP and then a child account with the stuff you’re deploying.

Reminds me of a bank account I had in Australia back in 1999 (I think it was Commonwealth Bank). I'd opened it as I was there travelling for a year and it made EFTPOS (early payment by card) easier and cheaper than using my UK bank card.

At the end of the year of travel, I went into the branch to close the account and they said I couldn't close it because I couldn't withdraw the remaining $2.11 because it was lower than the minimum withdrawal amount (I think maybe $10) and that I should just leave it open.

About a year later, I got the latest 6 month statement that they'd posted internationally saying that my account was now $100 ish overdrawn, because they'd started charging me a monthly fee on the account, and somehow I was just expected to have known that. The previous statement hadn't mentioned it, they'd just started charging it because they'd introduced a fee for accounts with a low balance. It took about several long international phone calls (and back then they were about $0.40 per minute, at least one was probably an hour long) to convince them that I had no plans to return to Australia in the foreseeable future, or to pay them the account fee especially given that I had attempted to close the account previously and they refused, and finally they agreed to close the account and waive the fee. But I'd spent loads in charges on the international calls, and they'd posted me a statement twice printed on heavy non-airmail paper, all because they wouldn't just let me shut my account when I originally asked in branch to do it.

25 years later and I still haven't gone back to Australia, even though it was one of the best years of my life. I'm going blame the bank for that (even though it was really just not having the opportunity to go again!)