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Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?
I just logged into my AWS account and I noticed every charge has doubled for my September usage, literally overnight!
I called AWS and they said this has been reported by multiple people and they still don't know how many accounts are affected, did this happen to you too?
- jayzalowitz 7y agoAre you at an account anniversary? What does the service broken down billing say your biggest cost is?
- tayleeganj 7y agoLol will have to check for a coe
- human20190310 7y agoIs there a word for cloud billing anxiety yet? I had an AWS account I wasn't using, but I didn't want to get surprised by any bills, so I set an alert to let me know when the bill was more than $0. Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself. I closed it altogether after that. It's better for my sanity to just use a new email address and sign up again than to worry about surprise bills. EDIT: It's entirely possible that I set it up wrong, or set up the wrong thing, but in any case an alert was all I was trying to do, and as far as I could tell that's what happened. I must admit I rage-quit rather than investigate too deeply.
- cameronbrown 7y ago> Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself. They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge for that.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rumanator 7y agoAWS is a gigantic exercise in figuring out how to gouge customers. Case in point: charging API gateways per HTTP request.
- sciurus 7y agoI don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service, and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API gateway (or any load balancer).
- rumanator 7y agoWhich other service provider puts a price tag on each HTTP request routed through a reverse proxy? Some service providers such as Hetzner don't even charge for bandwidth up to 20TB, but somehow AWS found a way to hike the bill per HTTP request.
- oldmanhorton 7y agoI've never used AWS so perhaps I'm mistaken, but api gateways normally provide extra functionality on top of just proxying the request. You can still set up a server listening on port 80 or 443 with a public IP and make requests to it without being charged per request.
- aortenzi 7y agoYou can, and if you want to use Lambdas, you can also route to them from ALBs, which has a bit confusing of a pricing model for comparison, but has no per-request cost.
- 7y ago
- meritt 7y agoYes, just saw this too. This is showing across all service types for me. Anything that is billed based on a unit of time has exactly 2x the consumption than has happened so far month-to-date.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- TruffleLabs 7y agoThanks for the heads up. Our AWS costs were definitely up almost 30% for this month! Checking billing details...
- hanoz 7y agoMine is showing as roughly twice what I'd expect it to be on the billing home page. It looks about right on the cost explorer though. I got an alert for crossing a billing threshold only five hours ago, as expected for this time of the month; now the total is just under double that. It's quite an intriguing error. I'm struggling to imagine how it might have come about.
- rantwasp 7y agoif i had to guess I would say that some usage data was piped through the billing system twice. Given how may people are experiencing this I hope this will be fixed in a timely manner.
- KenanSulayman 7y agoYes, seeing the same on the Billing & Cost Spend Summary; but the correct amounts are displayed in the AWS Cost Management dashboard [0]. [0] https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-reports/home#/dashboard https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-reports/home#/dashboard
- kumarm 7y agoYes. This is the case for us too. Cost reports is showing accurate information.
- Pfhreak 7y agoMy website bill rose to exactly double. It's still only a dollar, but that's twice what I was paying last month!
- captkos 7y agoYeah something is crazy.. I killed a bunch of service content and my cost STILL seems to be going up.. My bill for this month (even after the reduction) is going to be almost 85% higher than last month with the same level of activity.
- lolinder 7y agoI wouldn't go killing important servers if I were you. I'm showing a bill for 950+ hours for a bunch of services that I only have one instance of each. Since that's not possible (there aren't that many hours in a month), and Cost Explorer has the correct numbers, I'm assuming that there's a mistake that's causing double-counting on the billing dashboard.
- devoply 7y agoThere was recently an error where AWS send the bill twice and then sent an apology e-mail. It may have something to do with this.
- dgemm 7y agoIt is a mistake in the billing console.
- gwillen 7y agoI was also seeing a surprising cost of about twice what I expected, but since I rarely use AWS I was assuming I had just calculated it wrong somehow. It's maddeningly difficult to see your usage history of services -- I still can't figure out how to see what my EC2 usage was this month. There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's not even clear that it will include my historical activity when it's ready...
- xtracto 7y agoAWS usage reporting is utter crap. The only usable data for me has been the actual billing table. But that is only monthly.
- paulfurtado 7y agoYou can make it dump monthly billing CSVs to s3 daily. You'll get a new CSV each day that contains the month to date so it gets bigger every day until it resets the next month.
- paulddraper 7y agoThe good news is that is that Cost Explorer is quite useful once it's on.
- userbinator 7y agoThere is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's not even clear that it will include my historical activity when it's ready... Cost Explorer itself also charges per use. I'm not kidding: https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/pricing/ https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/pricing/
- brianmathews 7y agoThe API charges per use, but not the cost explorer dashboard itself.
- agotterer 7y agoAbout an hour ago I received a refund receipt from AWS for the extra charge. So it seems like they are addressing the issue.
- AimForTheBushes 7y agoYep, exactly double.
- jared_nyc 7y agoSame here. Just checked my Org consolidated bill. Every service looks to be about double, However if you go to the Cost & Usage report, it looks right.
- encoderer 7y agoOh no somebody ran the cron job twice. Call me, aws. I can help. I know cron jobs.
- quickthrower2 7y agoDon’t call it that. It’s a Lambda.
- edwhitesell 7y agoNo issues on bills of two orgs I have access to. Cost Explorer shows data as it should too.
- k__ 7y agoFrom 1 to 2€? Maybe...
- johneke 7y agoI wonder if AWS is prepping for a pricing hike but someone was trigger happy with the big red button :D
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dpeterson 7y agoI opened a service ticket. My ec2 instances have somehow been running for over 950 hours in one month. I can go back and see my instances run for 744 hours (what i'd expect in a month) in previous months. Amazon invented more hours than actually exist in a month for billing purposes. Bezos is a genius! I should have thought of that!
- 0xmohit 7y agoCame across this long back: 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2. Maybe Bezos read this recently and decided to use large values of 24 to compute number of hours in a month.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hdfbdtbcdg 7y agoEDIT: deleted
- rosswilson 7y agoEC2 instances are now billed at per-second granularity, with a minimum charge of 60 seconds.
- donarb 7y agoI just received this email from Amazon on Thursday afternoon, this may be related: "We are notifying you that we incorrectly issued an early invoice for your September AWS usage on September 18th. As your card was charged successfully for this invoice, we are currently processing a refund for the unexpected charge. The refund generally takes 3-5 business days to be received by your bank and some banks may require additional processing time. Your full monthly usage will be invoiced through our normal billing process on or around the 3rd of October. We will send another notification when your correct September invoice is available. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this error. There is no action required from you, but if you have any questions, please contact the AWS Customer Service Team by visiting: https://aws.amazon.com/support https://aws.amazon.com/support, and opening a case by selecting 'Create Case'. You can then select ‘Account and Billing Support’ , followed by ’Billing’ for the Service, and ‘Charge Inquiry’ for the Category."
- cortesoft 7y agoYeah, I got the same email.
- cochne 7y agoYep this happened to me.
- brendanw 7y agoYup, I am seeing double as well.
- meow_mix 7y agoi can't wait for this COE
- phyzome 7y agoI usually get billed 54 to 58 cents per month. It's showing me 70 cents for the current month, for a projected 91 cents!
- hdpq 7y agoI'm showing double the amount of hosted zones in Route 53. Kind of odd
- guitarnick 7y agoWe were just about to submit a ticket when the forecast/breakdown returned to normal. Looks like fixes are rolling out.
- cbsks 7y agoWhenever I hear news like this, part of me feels bad for all the programmers working very long hours to fix the problem. You can be sure that a lot of pagers started to go off as soon as the reports of billing issues started to come in.
- jagannathtech 7y ago'pagers' Now that's a word that I have not heard in a long time...
- cbsks 7y agoYou can tell that I haven’t worked in an on call position in a while...
- propogandist 7y agoPagerDuty makes a lot of money https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/pd https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/pd
- benj111 7y agoMy partner still gets a pager for on call at a hospital, she gets a phone as well.
- t34543 7y agoA colleague is a former AWS employee - my understanding is nobody wants to touch the billing code for this reason. I think that also explains why the billing interface leaves a bit to be desired.
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- raverbashing 7y agoI think it might have charged people for free-tier eligible usage as well I've seen it happen
- sashavingardt2 7y agoMine doubled. Got a non sensical reply from AWS. Now back to normal.
- peterburkimsher 7y agoWe had a problem with malware mining Bitcoin on our AWS instance a few weeks ago: https://www.cybereason.com/blog/new-pervasive-worm-exploiting-linux-exim-server-vulnerability https://www.cybereason.com/blog/new-pervasive-worm-exploitin...
- azdacha 7y agoThis is absolutly not related, but on a funny note, I got subribed to prime forcefully last month. I'm highly suspicious toward Amazon behaviour now. This kind or news only flurish the idea that Amazon has taken it's first steps toward being a total a company.
- captkos 7y agoI got a response back and my time was corrected (quick glance).. I will be more thorough from this point on. But for me the quick and dirty is comparing to the previous months bill.. Normally is enough, except for this month.
- shadiakiki 7y ago"isitfit" (https://isitfit.autofitcloud.com https://isitfit.autofitcloud.com) is a downloadable command-line tool that calculates billed usage of EC2 instances from the number of running hours over the last 90 days. You could reconcile it against the EC2 section in your AWS bill. To download it, use `pip3 install isitfit` and then just run the command `isitfit`. It's free and open-source at https://github.com/autofitcloud/isitfit https://github.com/autofitcloud/isitfit Edit: On a side-note, this week is the global climate strike week (https://globalclimatestrike.net/ https://globalclimatestrike.net/). Consider running `isitfit --optimize` to identify underused EC2 instances, downsize them, and use the saved money to save the planet.
- iconara 7y agoIs anyone still seeing problems like this? I found duplicate entries in our Parquet CUR reports, but not in the CSV versions (we export both, for reasons). The duplicates were from 24 September beween 00:00 and 13:00 UTC and only for Usage and DiscountedUsage. Not limited to EC2, though, it was Redshift, CloudWatch, and a lot of other services too.