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Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

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31–40 of 76 posts

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#32
post #9

If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it starts. A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25 cent mystery charge appears every month. AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at escalation, and of course the credit card company can…

I had a similar thing recently. As I understand it, AWS uses a digital token for your added a credit card. Contact your card provider to renew/rotate/delete the digital token that is attached to your card. That should stop charges.

Doing that obviously might impact other services for which you use that card so you might need to re-add your card to those services.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#33

If you're using Datadog with its AWS integration, you can pull in your billing metrics and set up anomaly detection monitoring. If you set it up as a multi-alert, Datadog can event alert you on the specific category that has a billing anomaly.

Use one opaque black box of costs to get clarity on another opaque black box of costs. I don't recommend this.

Datadog very quickly adds on costs for things you have no idea you need or want. You have an additional "host parametrix double-channel provider" and it's an extra $200/month per 2000 items. 2000 items of what? I don't know but you are at 1900 now and there's still 10 days to go in the month. Also, to manage those 2000 items, you need 2 additional pipe funnels so the data is churned to the right settings.... and so on.

The sales team signed you on $60/month and now you're at $2189.48 and counting. Where the fuck is all this money going? you say to yourself and the inertia takes over and you close the Datadog tab.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#34
Can someone just make “AWS insurance”? Honestly seems like a service that some people might pay for.. like pay $100/month to have some service monitor and guarantee that your services will be scaled back or turned off if you hit your quota.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#35
post #4

How much was that domain name?

Lol, we get that question all the time. One day we got offered $17,000 USD for the domain and it wasn't even the best offer that day

So if that wasn't the best offer for the day, what makes that offer stand out to be mentioned vs the highest offer you had received that day?

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#36

If you're using Datadog with its AWS integration, you can pull in your billing metrics and set up anomaly detection monitoring. If you set it up as a multi-alert, Datadog can event alert you on the specific category that has a billing anomaly.

Use one opaque black box of costs to get clarity on another opaque black box of costs. I don't recommend this. Datadog very quickly adds on costs for things you have no idea you need or want. You have an additional "host parametrix double-channel provider" and it's an extra $200/month per 2000 items. 2000 items of what? I don't know but you are at 1900 now and there's still 10 days to go in the month. Also, to manage…

I really reach to use DD but I’ve heard a ton of stories like this and they scared me away.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#37
post #15
post #9

If only there were a way to stop the surprise billing once it starts. A friend created an AWS account with a new email address for a one-off side project, and wound up locked out of both the email account and the AWS account. But AWS has the credit card, so a 25 cent mystery charge appears every month. AWS support is completely useless despite years of attempts at escalation, and of course the credit card company can…

Report the card as stolen so it's reissued with a new number :)

I did that and next month new unapproved charge again. What happened is they auto updates stolen card with Postmates and then told me to contact Postmates but I don’t have account with them. I basically now have to cancel credit card every month. I’m just gonna have to figure out how to get new one.

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#38
post #34

Can someone just make “AWS insurance”? Honestly seems like a service that some people might pay for.. like pay $100/month to have some service monitor and guarantee that your services will be scaled back or turned off if you hit your quota.

Or just setup regular alerts / emails from AWS...

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of worries about 3$ per year.

I think it's the premise rather than the cost that matters. I'd be scared that $3 turns into $300 or something

Or everyone starts doing it. That will quickly add up. Just think of revenue they could get from millions of users for providing no service at all...

Re: Avoid Surprise Bills from AWS

#40
There are so many unlimited liability services that are extremely difficult to avoid as a business.

I presume the primary issues is that service suppliers don't want to implement the systems to actually measure realtime costs properly (due to implementation costs, and balance sheet liability avoidance?).

For example we wished to buy an IP phone service, but to avoid the high cost of getting hacked I wanted a way to limit our liability. There were not many choices. We choose a solution that was a prepay dollars-per-month-per-line system where we still signed unlimited liability: but at least it was more likely the cost would be controlled by the provider to the prepay amount (unless limit was lifted by crackers changing account limits). We were also careful with website passwords, and we paid on a business credit card for a second layer of protection.

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