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Given my experience with AWS, I doubt this is reliable in any way... Every bill I've ever seen(and paid personally for that matter) felt a bit like someone play

Given my experience with AWS, I doubt this is reliable in any way... Every bill I've ever seen(and paid personally for that matter) felt a bit like someone played darts blindfolded. One that really struck me (around 3 years ago when I decided to move over to gcp) was two consecutive months: my usage was 99.2% identical. First month my bill was around 151.01 euros. Second month it was 235.32. Everything was absolutely identical, API's usage, storage, traffic, everything. I compiled a report sent it over to their support and I got a convoluted response which could roughly be summarized with ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

scrollaway 7y ago
> my usage was 99.2% identical What does that mean? If you're talking about S3, things like PUTs are way more expensive than GETs for example (by two magnitudes). So your usage can be "nearly identical", you can still spend money on precious GETs. Example: Last month I spent around 300 EUR on food. The month before, I spent 150 EUR, yet my food was "97% identical", the 3% being those two times I ordered 75 EUR of sushi takeout. PS: A lot of people get frustrated/confused by AWS pricing and, fair enough, but for a lot of businesses it's often a feature that they allow developers to architect their applications with costs in mind. It's a knife that cuts three different ways.
- axegon_ 7y ago
  Yeah, I know how that works. And no, none of that. In my case it was renting a GPU for training a model. No put traffic involved in either of the cases, the data was in a s3 prior to that. It was simply tweaking hyperparameters in the code, nothing more. On both occasions it took the exact same time, exact same to train, exact same resources. There were apparently no changes to the pricing but still. I'm referring to aws's quantum bills as a whole. Never had such issues with gcp... Yet...
  - enitihas 7y ago
    Does cost explorer show no difference in your top costs?
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    If you're willing to share the reports you wrote up, I'd be curious to take a look at them.
  - NikolaeVarius 7y ago
    Cost explorer should show exactly what was going on.
  - barkingcat 7y ago
    In that case, that sounds like Amazon is charging you differently based on how other people are using their resources. In the times of surge pricing, I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing that to make it so they make the same amount of profit, regardless of how much you are directly using, but depending on whether they are getting enough money from all tenants of a particular shared host. So if other people are paying less, they jack up your pricing to equalize things out so at the end of the day, their systems are still hitting their profit target.
VWWHFSfQ 7y ago
All of AWS' billing criteria are very clearly published, and IMO, reliable. The variable cost in most scenarios is active usage (ie, API calls). The inactive usage (storage) is very cheap and predictable.
memset 7y ago
I am not sure why this is the highest-voted comment. The OP has shared a tool which performs a calculation for a pricing estimation. This comment does not address the metrics, or the accuracy, of the calculator. It makes a complaint about AWS pricing, but does not attempt to evaluate or comment on the post, or even provide evidence for the unrelated claim about AWS.
- Operyl 7y ago
  HN comment sorting is weird. It’s not based solely on upvotes, as far as I can guess. Probably a mixture of upvotes/downvotes/flags much like the homepage is.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- onion2k 7y ago
  The post is commenting on the pricing calculator; if AWS's pricing varies month-on-month for the same usage then there is no way a calculator for it can be accurate even with the caveat that it's "only an estimate." An estimate that's out by 50% is effectively useless.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

scrollaway 7y ago

> my usage was 99.2% identical What does that mean? If you're talking about S3, things like PUTs are way more expensive than GETs for example (by two magnitudes). So your usage can be "nearly identical", you can still spend money on precious GETs. Example: Last month I spent around 300 EUR on food. The month before, I spent 150 EUR, yet my food was "97% identical", the 3% being those two times I ordered 75 EUR of sushi takeout. PS: A lot of people get frustrated/confused by AWS pricing and, fair enough, but for a lot of businesses it's often a feature that they allow developers to architect their applications with costs in mind. It's a knife that cuts three different ways.

axegon_ 7y ago
Yeah, I know how that works. And no, none of that. In my case it was renting a GPU for training a model. No put traffic involved in either of the cases, the data was in a s3 prior to that. It was simply tweaking hyperparameters in the code, nothing more. On both occasions it took the exact same time, exact same to train, exact same resources. There were apparently no changes to the pricing but still. I'm referring to aws's quantum bills as a whole. Never had such issues with gcp... Yet...
- enitihas 7y ago
  Does cost explorer show no difference in your top costs?
- scrollaway 7y ago
  If you're willing to share the reports you wrote up, I'd be curious to take a look at them.
- NikolaeVarius 7y ago
  Cost explorer should show exactly what was going on.
- barkingcat 7y ago
  In that case, that sounds like Amazon is charging you differently based on how other people are using their resources. In the times of surge pricing, I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing that to make it so they make the same amount of profit, regardless of how much you are directly using, but depending on whether they are getting enough money from all tenants of a particular shared host. So if other people are paying less, they jack up your pricing to equalize things out so at the end of the day, their systems are still hitting their profit target.

VWWHFSfQ 7y ago

All of AWS' billing criteria are very clearly published, and IMO, reliable. The variable cost in most scenarios is active usage (ie, API calls). The inactive usage (storage) is very cheap and predictable.

memset 7y ago

I am not sure why this is the highest-voted comment. The OP has shared a tool which performs a calculation for a pricing estimation. This comment does not address the metrics, or the accuracy, of the calculator. It makes a complaint about AWS pricing, but does not attempt to evaluate or comment on the post, or even provide evidence for the unrelated claim about AWS.

Operyl 7y ago
HN comment sorting is weird. It’s not based solely on upvotes, as far as I can guess. Probably a mixture of upvotes/downvotes/flags much like the homepage is.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
onion2k 7y ago
The post is commenting on the pricing calculator; if AWS's pricing varies month-on-month for the same usage then there is no way a calculator for it can be accurate even with the caveat that it's "only an estimate." An estimate that's out by 50% is effectively useless.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]