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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

#111

Post by blitzar »

snoman wrote: post #36
karolist wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel so to. The cloud billing model shifts responsibility to users under the guise of "flexibility" and "customization". Imagine a car rental company that charges you by the millisecond for every component - engine camshaft revolutions, tire rotations, windshield wiper activations, seat heating time and so on, but has the ability to set up alerts for each component so that customers "control" their usage and budget…

The alternative is charging for the rental by the day but a huge proportion of your customers (who probably own a bmw) constantly complain that they’re being overcharged and they want a discount cause they don’t need the blinkers, and refuse to pay for them. I joke, but this persona is very real, and it leads you to this nickel and dime billing model.

Being cheap (in this way) is so often incredibly expensive.

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

#113

Post by ivan_gammel »

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.

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.

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

#114

Post by te_chris »

dkersten wrote: post #71

I know it’s minor in comparison, but I will never use AWS again after running up a $100 bill trying to get an app deployed to ECS. There was an error (on my side) preventing the service from starting up, but cloud waatch only had logs about 20% of the time, so I had to redeploy five times just to get some logs, make changes, redeploy five more times, etc. They charged me for every single failed deploy. After about tw…

I gave up on AWS when I realised you can’t deploy a container straight to ec2 like you can on GCP. For bigger things, yeah the support’s better, for anything small to mid GCP all day. Primitives that actually make sense to how we use containers and such these days. And Bigquery

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

#115

Post by codedokode »

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.

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.

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

#116

Post by presentation »

_bare_metal wrote: post #90
devoutsalsa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bare metal server with unmetered bandwidth.

Indeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference : https://baremetalsavings.com

If anything this makes me feel better since my workload doesn’t require very beefy machines and the amount id be saving is basically irrelevant compared to my labor costs.

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

#117

Post by benterix »

weinzierl wrote: post #76
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 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…

I guess you'd want Hetzner. You get a generous amount per server and then a reasonable price for each additional TB.

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

#118

Post by akira2501 »

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…

> I've been putting off digging into AWS for years now

In my opinion people end up in these billing situations because they don't actually "dig in" to AWS. They make their pricing easily accessible, and while it's not always easy to understand, it is relatively easy to test as most costs scale nearly linearly.

> the rational fear of waking up to massive charges.

Stay away from the "wrapper" services. AWS Amplify, or Cloudformation, or any of their Stack type offerings. Use the core services directly yourself. All services have an API. Getting an API key tied to an IAM user is as simple as clicking a button.

Everything else is manageable with reasonable caching and ensuring that your cost model is matched to your revenue model so the services that auto scale cost a nearly fixed percentage of your revenue regardless of current demand. We take seasonal loads without even noticing most years.

Bandwidth is the only real nightmare on AWS, but they offer automatic long term discounts through the console, and slightly better contract discounts through a sales rep. Avoid EC2 for this reason and because internal bandwidth is more expensive from EC2 and favor direct use of Lambda + S3 + CloudFront.

After about 3 months it became pretty easy to predict what combination of services would be the most cost effective to use in the implementation of new user facing functionality.

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

#119

Post by user432678 »

_bare_metal wrote: post #90
devoutsalsa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bare metal server with unmetered bandwidth.

Indeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference : https://baremetalsavings.com

This is really nice, thank you!

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

#120

Post by benterix »

hnben wrote: post #110
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…

could you set a limit to the credit-card associated with the cloud service? Or would it still create costs after the limit has run out, which they would collect in other ways?

No, setting a limit doesn't work. They will still try to charge you. A friend had a charge for $0.35 running for a year after his credit card expired. They closed his account later but would definitely come after you if the amount was significant.
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