Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here. One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling? AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing).…
I don't think that actually holds up. There are certainly some people that want "ironclad guarantees", but the reality of cost here is pretty close: you pay $5/mo max for the server. The things that can cost more are either overages on bandwidth/dns (and here, 1TB of bandwidth on the low end is included, eliminating a lot of the flux from EC2), or things you choose to initiate, like snapshots. It feels like the large…
Setting cost caps on more complex applications that use a lot of different AWS services would get complex in a hurry and could easily have unintended effects.
As someone else wrote, I view this as primarily a simple VPS for people who are already using AWS for other things. I suspect that AWS isn't really interested in being a VPS-only provider for the most price-sensitive customers.