14 ms·

This is exactly it. 5-6 years ago (I think), I signed up for an aws account under the "free" or educational or something tier. AWS was newish at the time, and

by blhack 10y ago

This is exactly it. 5-6 years ago (I think), I signed up for an aws account under the "free" or educational or something tier. AWS was newish at the time, and I wanted to learn about it. Via some accidental clicking in the control panel (trying to get an IP address for the instance, I think?) I ended up getting a bill from them for over $100. Which, to me at the time, was a huge amount of money. It put me off of AWS forever. I don't ever want something that tells me how much they're going to charge me after I have already given them my credit card information. edit: they did credit me back when I complained, but that doesn't matter. The risk to me wasn't/isn't worth it.

tedmiston 10y ago
I got my first bit of AWS credit in a cloud class and something like this was common. From what I've heard they will null out the bill if they can see you didn't use it.
arcticfox 10y ago
100%. I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could have set yours at like $5 or even $0 (free tier) and never run into that. One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget" turned out only to be an alarm, and even that they sent us 8 hours late, after $1600 of charges had been racked up. I responded in 20 minutes and shut it down. Google insisted we pay the full bill. After I wrote up a blog post on the situation and had the "publish" button warmed up, they finally relented and refunded us for the amount of time their alarm was delayed. Absolutely ridiculous that's not their policy to begin with...
- zwischenzug 10y ago
  Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was no one-click 'suspend at x$'. For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.
  - Pyxl101 10y ago
    It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or something in between? There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling? Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an extremely dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user. Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one. AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources. If you think all of this through, it's really hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.
    - mrob 10y ago
      Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are minor problems compared to potential starvation and homelessness.
- xeromal 10y ago
  I'm pretty sure Azure had that the last time I used it.
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    Nope. They have billing alerts ('beta') and used to offer a prepaid account type that they have discontinued for new customers (some may still have grandfathered accounts). Closest thing now is the MSDN credit. It doesn't require a credit card and the account auto-suspends when you hit it. Problem with the MSDN credit is that it is for non-production only (and they reserve the right to kill anything they consider "production"). They should really offer prepaid again or bill caps. But Microsoft is too busy copying AWS to consider that they can do better than AWS.
    - altano 10y ago
      Azure has spending limits for the subscription which is what is being discussed.
    - soverance 10y ago
      uh.... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/
- forgottenacc57 10y ago
  Amazon lets you set a cost limit in your account. Look it up.
  - Someone1234 10y ago
    I did. They don't. They offer billing alerts, have a budget tracker thingy, but have no actual automated caps. Closest thing you can do is write one yourself using the AWS APIs.
    - seoseokho 10y ago
      Yeah, gotta monitor daily
  - daveguy 10y ago
    That is only for automated reporting and alerts. It does not allow you to actually limit your expenses.
    - eropple 10y ago
      IIRC, it can fire off to a SNS topic; you can burn down your stuff to your heart's content.
  - fweespeech 10y ago
    Billing alerts that are simply a notification you exceeded $X is not any sort of limit, particularly when they may take hours to arrive.
- kzisme 10y ago
  Is the free tier even worth trying out? I went to look into it previously, but stopped before entering my CC info. Can it incur charges even if you've set up the server to only be a free tier?
  - tylerjd 10y ago
    Yes, when I was still in high school, I had set up a Munin graphing node on AWS. Well, what I didn't realize at the time was that Munin likes to use a lot of disk IO every time it writes out the graphs. AWS charges for I/O on their SAN (not on local disks, but the free tier doesn't come with local disks), and so I ended up with a $150 bill and only use them now for Route53 (DNS hosting, it is fantastic for that), and S3/Glacier for archival storage. It is worth trying if just to gain knowledge on AWS. But for hosting, I'd say DigitalOcean
    - mnordhoff 10y ago
      The newer EBS types don't charge per I/O operation. (Provisioned IOPS types charge for the speed you theoretically can do, but don't charge for the ops you do do.) https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/
  - jdwithit 10y ago
    Depends what you want to get out of it. I used it for a year to host a crappy blog that got trivial amounts of traffic. It's perfectly fine for its primary use case of getting your feet wet in the AWS ecosystem, learning what all the different features are for, and how to manage them. If you want to do any "real work" you'll blow past what the free tier offers, but that's ok with me. Yes, you can incur charges if you exceed what's covered by the free tier. Not all AWS services even have a free tier, and those that do are severely limited (1 micro instance, 5GB of S3 storage, etc). You're not off in some sandboxed environment where they just shut you down if you go over the limits. It's more like a monthly credit of $X for the first 12 months of your account. To cover my ass, I set a really low billing alert threshold. Like "email me if my monthly bill ever projects to exceed $1".
- __jal 10y ago
  Yep. I had a personal $400 learning experience with Amazon. They did refund it. My last company had a low-5-figure surprise a few years ago. Some of that could be considered their fault (alerts were sent to someone on vacation), but again, the refusal to allow the option of a "hit a limit, pull the plug" option is what causes this.
  - Johnny555 10y ago
    Of course, there's also the opposite scenario "So here we were, having the best sales day in our history, and suddenly Amazon pulled the plug on our servers because we went over our authorized limit! We lost 5-figures of sales that day. Sure, they sent us warnings, but the alerts went to someone on vacation... but why wouldn't they let us exceed the limit for a bit before they pull the plug"
    - tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
      nobody says that the hard limit should be there for everybody, but I SHOULD be able to hit a checkbox that says "no matter what happens, runaway CPU, somebody DDOSing me with traffic, runaway disk, I do not want to be responsible for more than $x/month" Personally this is the main reason why I have never considered using AWS for my small projects, but maybe this is an intentional choice by Amazon, to keep away "hobbyists" and only go after companies where an extra $1k in AWS bills this month is just a blip on the radar...
- bunderbunder 10y ago
  At least last I checked, Azure offers this.
- jopsen 10y ago
  > I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. It's not unlimited liability, most of their services have limits imposed. If you've scaled any service to thousands of machines you'll quickly find out that they stop you at 20-30 machines or so. Then you have to contact support to get the limit increased. Sure you can still rake up an unpleasant bill. But there are limits :)
  - vidarh 10y ago
    But even the default limits are high enough that there are plenty of companies that could at least in theory bankrupt themselves with it. Especially because there is no hard total cap, and so many services have high enough limits that you can get really nasty shocks if any one of them is maxed out. Even more so if you e.g. make use of different instance types (separate limits) in different regions (separate limits) and a wide range of services (separate limits). And I've done work for clients that have requested really big increases because of both realistic and unrealistic expectations of handling traffic peaks. E.g. one client asked for an increase to 100 instances of 2-3 different types in a few regions to be prepared to handle a couple of days of high traffic. If said event had happened, they scaled it all up, and somehow didn't take them down again, it'd only take a few days of charges for them to be insolvent at their then-current funding level. So you're right, there are limits, but limits or not doesn't matter if it's high enough that it can make you go out of business. Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever gone out of business because AWS was unwilling to forgive a "surprise" bill. I'd be inclined to assume that they're willing to stretch quite far to avoid that, given that they seem to be very good about it. But I'd also not want to stake my business on hoping Amazon will be charitable about something like that.
- ubercow13 10y ago
  Does this not work as a hard limit for App Engine? [0] It also says here [1] that 'Spending limits are set for paid apps and cannot be exceeded.' [0] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
  - arcticfox 10y ago
    I'm not sure because we don't use AppEngine, but these seem like two important caveats: > Important: Spending limits are not supported in the App Engine flexible environment > You may still be charged for usage of other Google Cloud Platform resources beyond the spending limit.
- vgt 10y ago
  Hey there, I work on Google Cloud. Did you set a billing alert? Google BigQuery has proactive "cost controls" that won't let you go overboard, whereas billing alerts are just that - alerts.
- wusher87 10y ago
  It's not actually unlimited liability. Every AWS service has a set of default limits, and you must request AWS raise those limits before you can provision additional resources. I agree with your larger point, but you're going to be surprised by a $500 bill, not a $500,000 bill.
wnevets 10y ago
The same thing happened to me when I first sign up for AWS. I contacted support and they just credited my account then gave me a promo on top of it.
paulrosenzweig 10y ago
I think it comes down to them seeing themselves as a utility. You wouldn't want to be prompted for payment confirmation every time you plug something into an outlet, but this does mean that you'll have a huge unexpected charge if you accidentally leave on the air conditioner when you go on vacation.
- drabiega 10y ago
  I think part of the reason that utilities can get away with this is the fact that the maximum bill you are likely to run up is generally 2x-3x your normal bill. This doesn't well for Amazon because your actual bill can be orders of magnitude larger than what you expect.
  - harshreality 10y ago
    What's the quote? Something like, "At some point a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference."
  - khuey 10y ago
    And every now and then a utility bill makes the news because someone's water line sprung a leak and they used $5000 worth of water in a month.
  - rz2k 10y ago
    I know two people near my parents who've ended up with $30,000+ water bills for a single month.
- blhack 10y ago
  I'm sure they see it that way. The problem here is that they aren't a utility unless the utility was also selling air conditioners and microwaves, and those air conditioners and microwaves had a button that said "Charge met 10x my normal bill this month" on them.
- bachmeier 10y ago
  Offering the option to cap expenditures doesn't affect anyone that chooses to not use that feature.
bduerst 10y ago
Similar experience here. In grad school I forgot to shut down an 8 core instance I was doing data analysis on and it ended up costing $400 before I noticed it. It would be great if when entering your CC information, they let you set a default monthly cap for all your projects, to be overridden at the project level if you suddenly need to spend more.
fmueller 10y ago
That's exactly the reason I wouldn't sign-up for something "free" when I was required to give away my credit card details.
pfranz 10y ago
Similar thing here (except I was trying to be more paranoid). Tested out the free tier of Amazon, but didn't realize spinning down and spinning up would ding me if they were within an hour. Even know, when I use it for testing and I'm being fairly careful, I'll get a $3 bill at the end of the month. I was trying to set up alerts, but their alerts and dashboard, while I'm sure super capable, is a bit overwhelming as a new user.
- ec109685 10y ago
  $3! :)
nullpage 10y ago
There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice with the same email address, but no way of knowing you had two accounts without paying really close attention to your account ID. So if you went to log in and used your email and one password, you would sign into one account, but if you used the same email and a different password, you would sign into the second account (who knows what would happen if both accounts had the same password). Anyways a couple years ago I signed up for an AWS account to mess around with the free tier (doing a pluralsight course I think), and after a bunch of messing around didn't touch it again for a while. A year after I was going to use AWS for something and forgot I had already setup an account earlier (or thought it was on a different email or whatever), and managed to sign up for a second account with the same email address (which now became the primary account). Continue down a few months and I start getting billing emails for a few dollars a month but could not figure out why (and the invoice wouldn't show up in my AWS console for that email address). After digging I realized somehow I had two AWS accounts one the same email and the bill was on the other one, but I couldn't log into it as I didn't remember the password, and doing the password reset would just sent me a reset for the second account. It took a tonne of back and forth emails with amazon support to get it fixed and gain access to both accounts, the charges ended up being for having a few VMs created (but stopped) and my free tier ran out so it was billing me a few dollars for storage a month. I haven't really touched AWS since after that because the billing can be so obtuse if you aren't paying very very close attention.
- cowsandmilk 10y ago
  > There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice Not a bug, this has been amazon's philosophy with accounts on all systems from very early on. Some of the initial designers of amazon knew families where multiple people shared one e-mail address, but wanted separate accounts for shopping. Multiple accounts per e-mail address was a concious design decision for all Amazon systems.
  - nullpage 10y ago
    A poorly implemented design decision then (which they turned off on AWS back in 2012 due to exactly this happening to many people). https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=101218 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=101218 There was no way at the time for me to a) see that I had a second account associated with my email address or b) reset the password for the second account without going through support c) merging the two accounts into one even with supports help.
traviswingo 10y ago
This happened at one of the first startups I worked at also. They were burning through a ridiculous amount of capital on AWS silly charges here and there. I think they were spending somewhere in the range of 5-6x what they really should have been spending just because they were "testing" features and forgetting about them. It's why all of my projects sit on DO and I only really use Route 53 from AWS.

by blhack 10y ago

tedmiston 10y ago

I got my first bit of AWS credit in a cloud class and something like this was common. From what I've heard they will null out the bill if they can see you didn't use it.

arcticfox 10y ago

100%. I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. If you were able to set hard caps, you could have set yours at like $5 or even $0 (free tier) and never run into that. One of my services had a Google BigQuery "budget" set at $100. One of our test machines went haywire and continuously submitted a bunch of jobs. The "budget" turned out only to be an alarm, and even that they sent us 8 hours late, after $1600 of charges had been racked up. I responded in 20 minutes and shut it down. Google insisted we pay the full bill. After I wrote up a blog post on the situation and had the "publish" button warmed up, they finally relented and refunded us for the amount of time their alarm was delayed. Absolutely ridiculous that's not their policy to begin with...

zwischenzug 10y ago
Me too. I want protection against my own stupidity, as well as sheer ignorance of the charges. This put me off AWS for years, and I was deeply shocked there was no one-click 'suspend at x$'. For a company that supposedly puts the customer first, this is appalling.
- Pyxl101 10y ago
  It's difficult to come up with a good model for how a billing ceiling would work in software as a service. A good start would be to fully specify what behavior you desire when an account hits its billing limit. Are you expecting everything to keep working like normal while the cloud provider pays the bill for those resources, or are you expecting the provider to fully shut everything down in a way that prevents the accrual of further costs, or something in between? There are a number of resource types that, simply by existing, will accrue costs. A lot of them, actually. On AWS that includes things like running EC2 instances, EBS volumes, RDS databases and backups, DynamoDB tables, data in S3 buckets, and more. The question is what should happen to these resources upon hitting a billing ceiling? Should EC2 instances be terminated (which deletes all data on them), DynamoDB tables deleted, S3 data erased, RDS databases deleted? If that was the behavior, it would be an extremely dangerous feature to enable, and could lead to catastrophically bad customer experiences. This is a nonstarter for any serious user. Conversely, if you expect those resources to continue to exist and continue operating, then that's basically expecting the cloud provider to pay your bill. The provider will then have to recoup those costs from other customers somehow, and so this option sets poor incentives and isn't fair to others. If you expect your account to remain open the following month, you'd have to settle the bill, and we're back to square one. AWS gives people tools to tackle this problem, such as billing alerts. These can notify you over SMS, email, or programmatically when you hit an "$X this month" billing threshold, and then you can decide what to do. Since these events can be processed programmatically, it's possible to build a system that will automatically take whatever action you'd like AWS to take, such as shutting things down or deleting resources. If you think all of this through, it's really hard to come up with an approach to billing limits that's fair and a good experience, so I think it's reasonable for cloud providers to give billing threshold alerts while leaving the choice of what to do in the hands of the customer.
  - mrob 10y ago
    Raise the price by the actual cost of keeping the resources suspended for a week multiplied by the estimated probability of it happening. If that week passes with no additional payment then delete everything. The additional cost doesn't have to be applied to unlimited liability accounts. What's so difficult about that? There's not much worse customer experience than massive unexpected debt. Outages and data loss are minor problems compared to potential starvation and homelessness.
xeromal 10y ago
I'm pretty sure Azure had that the last time I used it.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  Nope. They have billing alerts ('beta') and used to offer a prepaid account type that they have discontinued for new customers (some may still have grandfathered accounts). Closest thing now is the MSDN credit. It doesn't require a credit card and the account auto-suspends when you hit it. Problem with the MSDN credit is that it is for non-production only (and they reserve the right to kill anything they consider "production"). They should really offer prepaid again or bill caps. But Microsoft is too busy copying AWS to consider that they can do better than AWS.
  - altano 10y ago
    Azure has spending limits for the subscription which is what is being discussed.
  - soverance 10y ago
    uh.... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/spending-limits/
forgottenacc57 10y ago
Amazon lets you set a cost limit in your account. Look it up.
- Someone1234 10y ago
  I did. They don't. They offer billing alerts, have a budget tracker thingy, but have no actual automated caps. Closest thing you can do is write one yourself using the AWS APIs.
  - seoseokho 10y ago
    Yeah, gotta monitor daily
- daveguy 10y ago
  That is only for automated reporting and alerts. It does not allow you to actually limit your expenses.
  - eropple 10y ago
    IIRC, it can fire off to a SNS topic; you can burn down your stuff to your heart's content.
- fweespeech 10y ago
  Billing alerts that are simply a notification you exceeded $X is not any sort of limit, particularly when they may take hours to arrive.
kzisme 10y ago
Is the free tier even worth trying out? I went to look into it previously, but stopped before entering my CC info. Can it incur charges even if you've set up the server to only be a free tier?
- tylerjd 10y ago
  Yes, when I was still in high school, I had set up a Munin graphing node on AWS. Well, what I didn't realize at the time was that Munin likes to use a lot of disk IO every time it writes out the graphs. AWS charges for I/O on their SAN (not on local disks, but the free tier doesn't come with local disks), and so I ended up with a $150 bill and only use them now for Route53 (DNS hosting, it is fantastic for that), and S3/Glacier for archival storage. It is worth trying if just to gain knowledge on AWS. But for hosting, I'd say DigitalOcean
  - mnordhoff 10y ago
    The newer EBS types don't charge per I/O operation. (Provisioned IOPS types charge for the speed you theoretically can do, but don't charge for the ops you do do.) https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/ https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/previous-generation/
- jdwithit 10y ago
  Depends what you want to get out of it. I used it for a year to host a crappy blog that got trivial amounts of traffic. It's perfectly fine for its primary use case of getting your feet wet in the AWS ecosystem, learning what all the different features are for, and how to manage them. If you want to do any "real work" you'll blow past what the free tier offers, but that's ok with me. Yes, you can incur charges if you exceed what's covered by the free tier. Not all AWS services even have a free tier, and those that do are severely limited (1 micro instance, 5GB of S3 storage, etc). You're not off in some sandboxed environment where they just shut you down if you go over the limits. It's more like a monthly credit of $X for the first 12 months of your account. To cover my ass, I set a really low billing alert threshold. Like "email me if my monthly bill ever projects to exceed $1".
__jal 10y ago
Yep. I had a personal $400 learning experience with Amazon. They did refund it. My last company had a low-5-figure surprise a few years ago. Some of that could be considered their fault (alerts were sent to someone on vacation), but again, the refusal to allow the option of a "hit a limit, pull the plug" option is what causes this.
- Johnny555 10y ago
  Of course, there's also the opposite scenario "So here we were, having the best sales day in our history, and suddenly Amazon pulled the plug on our servers because we went over our authorized limit! We lost 5-figures of sales that day. Sure, they sent us warnings, but the alerts went to someone on vacation... but why wouldn't they let us exceed the limit for a bit before they pull the plug"
  - tetraodonpuffer 10y ago
    nobody says that the hard limit should be there for everybody, but I SHOULD be able to hit a checkbox that says "no matter what happens, runaway CPU, somebody DDOSing me with traffic, runaway disk, I do not want to be responsible for more than $x/month" Personally this is the main reason why I have never considered using AWS for my small projects, but maybe this is an intentional choice by Amazon, to keep away "hobbyists" and only go after companies where an extra $1k in AWS bills this month is just a blip on the radar...
bunderbunder 10y ago
At least last I checked, Azure offers this.
jopsen 10y ago
> I can't stand it. It's unlimited liability for anyone that uses their service with no way to limit it. It's not unlimited liability, most of their services have limits imposed. If you've scaled any service to thousands of machines you'll quickly find out that they stop you at 20-30 machines or so. Then you have to contact support to get the limit increased. Sure you can still rake up an unpleasant bill. But there are limits :)
- vidarh 10y ago
  But even the default limits are high enough that there are plenty of companies that could at least in theory bankrupt themselves with it. Especially because there is no hard total cap, and so many services have high enough limits that you can get really nasty shocks if any one of them is maxed out. Even more so if you e.g. make use of different instance types (separate limits) in different regions (separate limits) and a wide range of services (separate limits). And I've done work for clients that have requested really big increases because of both realistic and unrealistic expectations of handling traffic peaks. E.g. one client asked for an increase to 100 instances of 2-3 different types in a few regions to be prepared to handle a couple of days of high traffic. If said event had happened, they scaled it all up, and somehow didn't take them down again, it'd only take a few days of charges for them to be insolvent at their then-current funding level. So you're right, there are limits, but limits or not doesn't matter if it's high enough that it can make you go out of business. Which makes me wonder if anyone has ever gone out of business because AWS was unwilling to forgive a "surprise" bill. I'd be inclined to assume that they're willing to stretch quite far to avoid that, given that they seem to be very good about it. But I'd also not want to stake my business on hoping Amazon will be charitable about something like that.
ubercow13 10y ago
Does this not work as a hard limit for App Engine? [0] It also says here [1] that 'Spending limits are set for paid apps and cannot be exceeded.' [0] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing#spending_limit [1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
- arcticfox 10y ago
  I'm not sure because we don't use AppEngine, but these seem like two important caveats: > Important: Spending limits are not supported in the App Engine flexible environment > You may still be charged for usage of other Google Cloud Platform resources beyond the spending limit.
vgt 10y ago
Hey there, I work on Google Cloud. Did you set a billing alert? Google BigQuery has proactive "cost controls" that won't let you go overboard, whereas billing alerts are just that - alerts.
wusher87 10y ago
It's not actually unlimited liability. Every AWS service has a set of default limits, and you must request AWS raise those limits before you can provision additional resources. I agree with your larger point, but you're going to be surprised by a $500 bill, not a $500,000 bill.

wnevets 10y ago

The same thing happened to me when I first sign up for AWS. I contacted support and they just credited my account then gave me a promo on top of it.

paulrosenzweig 10y ago

I think it comes down to them seeing themselves as a utility. You wouldn't want to be prompted for payment confirmation every time you plug something into an outlet, but this does mean that you'll have a huge unexpected charge if you accidentally leave on the air conditioner when you go on vacation.

drabiega 10y ago
I think part of the reason that utilities can get away with this is the fact that the maximum bill you are likely to run up is generally 2x-3x your normal bill. This doesn't well for Amazon because your actual bill can be orders of magnitude larger than what you expect.
- harshreality 10y ago
  What's the quote? Something like, "At some point a quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference."
- khuey 10y ago
  And every now and then a utility bill makes the news because someone's water line sprung a leak and they used $5000 worth of water in a month.
- rz2k 10y ago
  I know two people near my parents who've ended up with $30,000+ water bills for a single month.
blhack 10y ago
I'm sure they see it that way. The problem here is that they aren't a utility unless the utility was also selling air conditioners and microwaves, and those air conditioners and microwaves had a button that said "Charge met 10x my normal bill this month" on them.
bachmeier 10y ago
Offering the option to cap expenditures doesn't affect anyone that chooses to not use that feature.

bduerst 10y ago

Similar experience here. In grad school I forgot to shut down an 8 core instance I was doing data analysis on and it ended up costing $400 before I noticed it. It would be great if when entering your CC information, they let you set a default monthly cap for all your projects, to be overridden at the project level if you suddenly need to spend more.

fmueller 10y ago

That's exactly the reason I wouldn't sign-up for something "free" when I was required to give away my credit card details.

pfranz 10y ago

Similar thing here (except I was trying to be more paranoid). Tested out the free tier of Amazon, but didn't realize spinning down and spinning up would ding me if they were within an hour. Even know, when I use it for testing and I'm being fairly careful, I'll get a $3 bill at the end of the month. I was trying to set up alerts, but their alerts and dashboard, while I'm sure super capable, is a bit overwhelming as a new user.

ec109685 10y ago
$3! :)

nullpage 10y ago

There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice with the same email address, but no way of knowing you had two accounts without paying really close attention to your account ID. So if you went to log in and used your email and one password, you would sign into one account, but if you used the same email and a different password, you would sign into the second account (who knows what would happen if both accounts had the same password). Anyways a couple years ago I signed up for an AWS account to mess around with the free tier (doing a pluralsight course I think), and after a bunch of messing around didn't touch it again for a while. A year after I was going to use AWS for something and forgot I had already setup an account earlier (or thought it was on a different email or whatever), and managed to sign up for a second account with the same email address (which now became the primary account). Continue down a few months and I start getting billing emails for a few dollars a month but could not figure out why (and the invoice wouldn't show up in my AWS console for that email address). After digging I realized somehow I had two AWS accounts one the same email and the bill was on the other one, but I couldn't log into it as I didn't remember the password, and doing the password reset would just sent me a reset for the second account. It took a tonne of back and forth emails with amazon support to get it fixed and gain access to both accounts, the charges ended up being for having a few VMs created (but stopped) and my free tier ran out so it was billing me a few dollars for storage a month. I haven't really touched AWS since after that because the billing can be so obtuse if you aren't paying very very close attention.

cowsandmilk 10y ago
> There was this awesome bug with AWS a while back too where you could accidentally sign up an account twice Not a bug, this has been amazon's philosophy with accounts on all systems from very early on. Some of the initial designers of amazon knew families where multiple people shared one e-mail address, but wanted separate accounts for shopping. Multiple accounts per e-mail address was a concious design decision for all Amazon systems.
- nullpage 10y ago
  A poorly implemented design decision then (which they turned off on AWS back in 2012 due to exactly this happening to many people). https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=101218 https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=101218 There was no way at the time for me to a) see that I had a second account associated with my email address or b) reset the password for the second account without going through support c) merging the two accounts into one even with supports help.

traviswingo 10y ago

This happened at one of the first startups I worked at also. They were burning through a ridiculous amount of capital on AWS silly charges here and there. I think they were spending somewhere in the range of 5-6x what they really should have been spending just because they were "testing" features and forgetting about them. It's why all of my projects sit on DO and I only really use Route 53 from AWS.