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Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

cloudirregular.substack.com

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Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#31

Post by stephenwilliams »

eric4smith wrote: post #20
harry8 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt. Wuuuttt? Fraud is what.

I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down. Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.

Perhaps you have a snapshot?

You should be able to look under your bill for a breakdown on what service the charge is for.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#32

Post by inetknght »

jerrysievert wrote: post #29

I had an AWS account for one of my businesses, and decided to bring it in-house about 2 months ago. went through the account deletion, and got yet charge/another bill today - account is deleted, so can't log in to see why I'm being charged. hopefully their support will help out, but not holding my breath. editing to add: billing was for db backups, I terminated the db, and no clue how to remove the automatic backups…

Without a receipt to show what's being charged for I'd just call the bank and ask for a chargeback.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#34

Post by stephenwilliams »

totetsu wrote: post #4

is there an IAC template somewhere that resets an aws account to 0 and deletes everything? I know this articles point is this shouldn't be possible, but as long as it is, there should be a simple measure, that could be linked in tutorials for stopping ongoing charges.

Another option:

https://github.com/gruntwork-io/cloud-nuke

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#35

Post by version_five »

gpm wrote: post #11
version_five wrote: post #3

I had an AWS account that charged me like $6 per month for a year after I thought I had turned everything off. I finally went on a hunt for what was causing it, and had to escalate to support to find it. This was 11/12 my fault I admit, I should have been on it after the first month. More recently, I was looking for a cloud GPU provider, and tried a different provider that I won't name. I tried out a ~$3 per hour ins…

> [Vague description of provider now removed] Hinting at the name like this seems unfair to any other companies that might reasonably be interpreted as "[Vague description of provider now removed]"... especially since I can't decide if you're sarcastic about [piece of description] part. At the very least [two names] are big names that you could plausibly be referring too... and I could see only one name coming into m…

I edited my comment if you want to edit yours.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#36

Post by NoPicklez »

Johnny555 wrote: post #15

As a personal user, I wish they gave two options to fix this. Option 1: When credit balance reaches a certain level (or monthly spend reaches a certain level), initiate a resource stop on every resource that can be stopped without data loss. This would still incur charges for some things like EBS volumes, S3 data, etc, but at least it would slow the bleeding. Option 2: I don't care about data loss, just terminate eve…

I think it should be option 2 by default, but allow you to customise later if you want resource stops on only certain resources.

So option 2 by default with option 1 customisable from then on.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#37

Post by aqsheehy »

This doesn't help those that have already been hurt, but when you're using any cloud provider for personal use make sure to set budgets and alerts for them. It's quite easy to set these up and they can save you a headache later on. Truth be told they should all be asking you what you expect to spend when you set up an account and alert you by default but just remember these cloud providers are not your friends.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#38

Post by p1necone »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #22

It's absolutely unacceptable that AWS hasn't fixed this, but in the meantime, would using a privacy.com temporary credit card with a ~$20 limit when signing up help? I'm unsure if those kinds of cards can be detected/blocked by AWS, or if they do.

Not paying the bill doesn't make the bill go away, you'd still owe Amazon the money unless support waived it.

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#39

Post by Vaslo »

I took a grad course course 2 years ago on cloud computing and we were showed how to setup a student account. I ran a few machines, shut them down, mostly did the stuff on a local server.

Suddenly I started getting hit with these real small charges each week. I never did figure it out and I certainly didn’t willfully authorize them. I just paid and then I annoyed them to shut off the account. I never could figure out what they were for.

I know many of you would hate this but I would love an option to shutdown everything until the bill is paid option. I bet the description of what I was paying for would have been a lot more helpful if they were losing the business then when they just auto charged!

Re: Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

#40

Post by technion »

I have a couple of $20 AWS vouchers from various things. I kind of want to give them to juniors and tell them to go and learn the product. But I won't, because if someone incurs a charge accidentally it'll be on me.

These threads always open a discussion about how hard limits would be unacceptable to some businesses, but the opposite also applies in other scenarios.

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