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My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

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Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#31

Post by tasogare »

code4tee wrote: post #25
altmind wrote: post #22

I wish AWS had hard spending limits. Azure have one - you spend over the set limit(probably per billing account?) and your services are suspended. Already saved my from unexpected bill this month.

Just setup billing alarms. Spend is reported continuously. These people surprised by end of month bills just aren’t paying attention to all the data AWS shows you on your spend. If they hard shut people down then people would be posting “AWS turned off my services and took my site down blah blah blah”

What about having choice? Hard limit and alert? I’m been bite by overspending accidentally on Azure (only ~30€ but still) so the hard cap is a real reassuring thing.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#32

Post by jrockway »

I really don't think this is a UX problem. It was pretty clear that there were two options, production-ready and free. If you want to be picky, I suppose you can be upset that RDS is just a couple of VMs that you can't run other things on, or to question how much performance benefit a certain number of provisioned IOPS gives you. I don't think that's a dark pattern so much as "we don't know what your workload looks like, you don't know what your workload looks like, so just provision a bunch of IOPS and hopefully we never speak again."

I am less surprised that the mental model fell apart. I guess a lot of people think cloud resources are something that is efficiently shared (consider S3, you pay per byte you store, store 0 bytes, pay $0). But that's actually a rare case, most of the time you are provisioning something for your exclusive use; if you have a database server it costs you the same whether it's doing 10000 transactions per second or sitting completely idle and never logged into.

(Incidentally, the true sharing model used to be popular. Shared hosting with no isolation between tenants predated AWS by a decade. You got a chunk of a computer and shared Apache, MySQL, and PHP with hundreds of other randoms. Very cheap!)

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#33

Post by txcwpalpha »

javagram wrote: post #14

If using AWS for personal use the first step should always be to set up a billing alarm. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... It’s very helpful. You can still end up overspending but at least you get an email within a day letting you know what’s going on, which can solve a lot of the cost overruns by giving you a chance to act quickly and only get hit with 1/30 the monthly fee.

AWS Budgets is a much better tool for this. It’s simpler to set up, no futzing with CloudWatch, and also alerts you when forecasted usage will exceed a set amount, so you are much less likely to overspend.

https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/aws-budgets/

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#34

Post by RobRivera »

gitgud wrote: post #27

I completely wasted $500 of free google cloud credit from having a 2 core Windows VM "idling" for a couple of days... thank god I checked the balance

I'm dated on my cloud vendor costs, but a 2core for a day is 500? Most of the cost the license? Windows server?

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#35

Post by isugimpy »

As somebody who deals with AWS professionally on a daily basis, I will 100% admit that it can be confusing for people to figure out pricing and scale. I have to talk with engineers every week about design decisions and their cost impacts, and the implications of the things they want to run, and it's clear that AWS doesn't give enough guidance in the UI or documentation structured in a way that a layperson could find what they're looking for quickly and easily for that information.

That said? This article rubs me the wrong way. The suggestion that this problem is caused by "dark patterns" and Amazon being misleading about "pay as you go" screams FUD to me. The screenshots provided right in the article clearly show that what was being done wasn't eligible for free tier. And not understanding that launching a resource, regardless of whether or not you're interacting with it, is consuming the service which launches the resource is a problem with the user, not the marketing. Yes, the author admits that they didn't scrutinize, but that doesn't excuse the position of the article that AWS is somehow doing this to intentionally bilk people.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#36

Post by Mo3 »

blagie wrote: post #3

TL;DR: Misleading title. Amazon service came through. * Author clicked through Amazon UI/UX, and ended up with a huge bill. * The UI/UX was confusing and poorly designed -- at no point was he shown he'd pay anything, let alone a lot. * He was refunded the money AND given credits to make up for the hassle. This is one of my key frustrations with Amazon. (1) I'd like services like RDS or similar on a pay-as-you-go fash…

Point #2 is wrong. It would have been absolutely clear had he read the info box or cared. Look at the first screenshot.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#37

Post by tjbiddle »

So, let me get this straight: - OP ignores the obvious "This does not fit the free tier" warnings when setting up their app. - OP does not pay attention to any billing metrics or even bother to try and understand the pricing beforehand. - OP gets hit with a $990 bill. - Amazon gives all the money back, plus free credits. - OP complains.

AWS should have kept their money and OP should've learned their lesson proper.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#38

Post by moksly »

omarhaneef wrote: post #26

If we are trading war stories: I was playing around with some tutorial to learn something (probably something cool like programming your own robotic drone using functional erlang or whatever), pushed to github and went to sleep. Woke up a few short hours later and had lots of emails about the machines I was spinning up. Checked and saw that my account had wracked up thousands of dollars overnight (I think 6-8 hours),…

Credentials on github is actually a fairly common cause for GDPR breach, not as common as people using auto-complete in their e-mail system, but it’s up there.

So you’re not as alone as you think, and these aren’t from people trying to learn something, it’s from big enterprise IT organisations.

Re: My First AWS “Free Tier” Hosting Bill Was $990

#40

Post by digitalsushi »

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #28
javagram wrote: post #14

If using AWS for personal use the first step should always be to set up a billing alarm. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori... It’s very helpful. You can still end up overspending but at least you get an email within a day letting you know what’s going on, which can solve a lot of the cost overruns by giving you a chance to act quickly and only get hit with 1/30 the monthly fee.

Why is this an extra step instead of something AWS always does? As both services and permissions multiply, the user experience of AWS is getting worse and worse. How would you even know to setup CloudWatch if it’s your first time using the service?

Why is it an extra step to request a wake up call when you get a hotel room? Just call every room at 6am.

Why is it an extra step to set a timer when you turn the oven on? Just set it to 60 minutes.

Why doesn't every toothbrush beep when you didn't brush long enough?

Why aren't the police keeping track of my children when they go outside?

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