27 ms·

Please fix the AWS free tier before somebody gets hurt

• bitwize 5y ago
  It's the AOL free trial business model. Give 'em a freebie, but take down their credit card info so you can start charging them the moment they exceed the limits of "free". And make it really hard to cancel. As for whether Amazon will listen, Upton Sinclair blah blah not understanding it.
• unilynx 5y ago
  Part of the problem is that AWS billing is soo slow to update. This doesn't only hit budgetting... trying to get all the costs to go the proper billing tags (and verify that you found them all) also requires test cycles of up to 2 days.
• alashley 5y ago
  Scary, I'd have similar fears about using Firebase/Firestore in a production app.
• version_five 5y ago
  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 instance, and shut it down after maybe 20 min. A few hours later I (thankfully) started getting billing alerts that my bill would be $1500 ish at the end of the months if my usage kept up. I couldn't find anything still running, could not get anything from support (they had some kind of chat support that told me to open a ticket), first opened a ticket then after and then after ab hour shut down my account as a last ditch effort. At which point they promptly emailed me an invoice for the $16 I had incurred during the time before I cancelled. The help desk relied to my ticket like a week later, asking for more information. Needless to say, I won't ever use that company again, but it could have been a lot worse, even more so if I was a student or someone who blew their whole experimentation budget on whatever mistake I made.
  • gpm 5y ago
    > [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 many peoples minds and then them assuming you're referring to that provider.
    • version_five 5y ago
      I edited my comment if you want to edit yours.
      • gpm 5y ago
        Edited :)
• totetsu 5y ago
  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.
  • tsfranke 5y ago
    https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke
  • jacobrussell 5y ago
    https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke
    • arthurcolle 5y ago
      I found this really hard to use. Asking for configuration credentials that I had no idea how to retrieve
  • stephenwilliams 5y ago
    Another option: https://github.com/gruntwork-io/cloud-nuke https://github.com/gruntwork-io/cloud-nuke
• jan_Inkepa 5y ago
  I've gotten thousands of euro of 'free' Amazon cloud credits over the years, and would love to have used tried it out for cloud computing/GPU stuff, but the opaqueness of pricing means I won't touch it (except for S3 backups) - I just don't trust myself enough to not mess up.
• eric4smith 5y ago
  Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". 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.
  • harry8 5y ago
    >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.
    • eric4smith 5y ago
      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.
      • NullPrefix 5y ago
        Could it be a convenience charge?
        • 55555 5y ago
          Perhaps a billing fee?
      • stephenwilliams 5y ago
        Perhaps you have a snapshot? You should be able to look under your bill for a breakdown on what service the charge is for.
      • joncalhoun 5y ago
• tsfranke 5y ago
  AWS offers throw away accounts during immersion days, jam sessions, etc (especially at re:invent). It would be great if these were extended to the general public, even if at a small fee.
  • Bluecobra 5y ago
    There’s a service like this called Qwicklabs that I have been using for GCP training. You load a time limited lab and get a new set of credentials only for that session. After the timer is up, poof everything is deleted.
• cookguyruffles 5y ago
  Arguably discovering surprise bills absolutely should be part of the free tier, how else can you mentally prepare for running something in production on AWS?
  • macintux 5y ago
    If someone told me about a cool new programming language and to teach myself how to use it could either be free or maybe $5000 because infinite loops are expensive, am I going to learn it? Hell no.
    • username90 5y ago
      Yeah, I'd dabble with this if not for me being forced to sign up with a credit card and them not offering any guarantees on how much they'd bill.
• WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
  If you delete your AWS account you will still be charged if you don’t remove / terminate some of your services for up to 90 days! https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/close-aws-account/ https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/close...
  • adamparsons 5y ago
    For me its currently over two years, not 90 days
• Johnny555 5y ago
  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 everything when I hit the threshold. This should require a double-opt in and maybe a warning banner in the console UI.
  • NoPicklez 5y ago
    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.
• throwawaaarrgh 5y ago
  Oh come on. We all know that the 'accidental revenue' from the way Free Tier is set up probably makes up a cool 2 million or more annually. Plenty to justify its continued abuse of naive students. Why would they walk away from that cash? The only people they're pissing off is people who aren't using AWS anyway.
  • akerl_ 5y ago
    I’ve heard of plenty of people accidentally blasting past the free tier, or past dev credits, or other ways where they got burned by a surprise bill. 100% of those people have gotten a refund from AWS support by filing a ticket. AWS pretty clearly isn’t raking in money on this. Even at your imaginary 2 million a year, that’s a drop in the bucket for AWS, let alone Amazon.
    • userbinator 5y ago
      AWS bets on everyone who doesn't notice small recurring charges, not those who blow up their budget past the point of sanity.
      • akerl_ 5y ago
        That seems even more implausible. Do charges small enough to not be noticed stand a chance of being noteworthy for AWS?
    • TameAntelope 5y ago
      It's got to be Hanlon's Razor here, I doubt AWS is twirling their mustache and cackling maniacally. It's probably a difficult problem to solve and not easily attachable to a profit center or something, so nobody feels empowered to actually fix it. I'm sure some crusader within AWS could get it done if they tried hard enough and collected the data to show the negative side effects and how they effect AWS. An article like this one is hopefully going to get someone within AWS to do just that.
      • akerl_ 5y ago
• aprdm 5y ago
  I really recommend using something like Linode for cheap throwaway, might be a bit more expensive (i.e: 5 per month), but the surprise factor disappears..
  • wyattpeak 5y ago
    You'd have to be doing something extremely small to make a $5 Linode more expensive. AWS might be cheaper for a static site, but as soon as you involve a database you're probably paying more. AWS is not cheap. A lot of people seem get bitten by this.
• asdev 5y ago
  unfortunately for most cloud providers, you have to read through pricing very carefully and be even more careful with what you deploy. an infinite loop could lead to $$$$ in charges and billing alerts just alert you, they don't actually shut anything off
• HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
  Is there seriously no way in AWS/Azure/GCP to specify "Here's my budget, shut everything down if I exceed $X"? I don't use those platforms much but was always surprised I couldn't find anything like that right off the bat. I'll build cloud stuff if it makes sense at work, but if I'm footing the bill I'll stick to something that can provide an actual upper limit.
  • josephorjoe 5y ago
    You can set price alerts to email you on the day when you cross a monthly spending limit, but it is not the simplest thing to figure out. I run a small server and have a few odds and ends and get emails at $5, $15, $50, $75, and $100. Haven't broken $75 limit yet...
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      The problem is that a billing alert at $10 won't prevent you from accidentally starting up something that will bring you a $1000 bill before you can react to that email - there needs to be a process that cuts off service at some hard limit instead of just sending an email and continuing to spend money.
      • josephorjoe 5y ago
        completely agree. even though it creates a new class of problem, there should be a "cut me off immediately at $XXXX per month" option.
  • newobj 5y ago
    Of course there's a way. But it's opt-in, not opt-out.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• cddotdotslash 5y ago
  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.
  • p1necone 5y ago
    Not paying the bill doesn't make the bill go away, you'd still owe Amazon the money unless support waived it.
• artichokeheart 5y ago
  AWS employs cost obfuscation by design otherwise the default view when you open the console would show you all of your current active services. Not only is that not the case, a single screen to show you all of your current active services doesn't exist. You need to take a deep dive into cost explorer (assuming you have access in corporate land) and try to decipher in what that all means.
  • indemnity 5y ago
    Azure does this a little better, but best would be to see a breakdown on the invoice with links directly back to the resource. Maybe there are discounts or other processing that makes this hard. Or, less charitably, this would lead to people optimising their costs a lot better and canceling unused services much sooner.
    • minxomat 5y ago
      Enterprise Agreement accounts aren’t billed on demand, so there’s little use for that in accounts spending a lot of money.
    • katbyte 5y ago
      Azure groups most things into resource groups which greatly simplifies things.
    • rorykoehler 5y ago
      Yes. Also split out into sub categories. How much of an ec2 spend was on bandwidth and how much on compute for example.
  • paaakthecaaa 5y ago
    They definitely need a senior executive to stand up and say, "The Customer wants us to be transparent in billing, fix that now." Then they need to start a team dedicated to finding a good way to let customers halt spending at a given limit with minimal impact on their operations. They already win on UX (okay, okay, it's an opinion ffs), but unlimited liability makes a lot of people very uncomfortable. Those two actions would go a long ways towards demonstrating good faith in that area. If it would cost too much, maybe they could present it as an easy way to cut expenses at the same time that they introduce a small price increase. This is a common and long-standing complaint/feature request.
• jld 5y ago
  A way to limit the max spend per month would be great, even if that means creates outages. I would happily put a $20/mo limit on many of my accounts. They should never bill more than few dollars a month.
• jerrysievert 5y ago
  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 it made. of course I can't log in to look any further.
  • inetknght 5y ago
    Without a receipt to show what's being charged for I'd just call the bank and ask for a chargeback.
• moolcool 5y ago
  I once had a cloud computing class and a lot of it was based on the AWS free tier. The number of students who got dinged and needed the professor to pull strings was... too many.
  • Vaslo 5y ago
    Came here to say the exact same.
• aqsheehy 5y ago
  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.
• Vaslo 5y ago
  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!
• technion 5y ago
  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.
• chpmrc 5y ago
  Funny story: I keep receiving a $0.01 monthly invoice from AWS for a very old account (opened 5+ years ago) I have lost access to. I have no idea why (the invoice doesn't list the services being used) and the associated credit card has expired a long time ago. They requested notarized documents to prove my identity. Obviously I'd rather settle my $6 (+ interest) debt 50 years from now than give hundreds to a notary today!
  • wittyreference 5y ago
    Any bank at which you are a customer will notarize documents for you for free.
    • chpmrc 5y ago
      I'm not from the US. This is not available in any of my banks.
      • jrockway 5y ago
        If notarization isn't common in the country where you are, you should probably escalate through AWS support in that country. They probably have an alternate procedure. If you're talking to US-based support, they are used to thinking this is a trivial request. Getting something notarized is something that can be handled in 5 minutes at places as common as convenience stores. Most people have coworkers that are notaries and can do it without even getting up from their desk. If that's not the case in your country, ask them for a different procedure. It's not something they intend to be onerous.
        • chpmrc 5y ago
          I'm not interested in recovering that account anyway, I'd spend more money (in terms of time spent dealing with them) on trying to get it back than what I'd owe in a few decades.
      • hnbad 5y ago
        In Germany you can also get documents notarized in (Catholic) parish offices. I think they do it for free. That said, this sounds unreasonable and if you're not in the US this may violate consumer protection regulations if they didn't require the same level of verification to sign the contract in the first place.
• nemothekid 5y ago
  > “It’s the student’s responsibility to know what they’re deploying.” Anyone who seriously argues this is 100% unaware of the quagmire that is AWS billing. There are companies with entire teams built around just optimizing AWS billing - it's whole unsurprising that some AWS feature actually spun up 5 separate AWS features that end up being billed.
  • adamparsons 5y ago
    Not to mention it only goes one-way. If you destroy the service that created all those others, it won't clean those others up.
  • ActorNightly 5y ago
    Ill seriously argue this. The issue is that when students are "learning" "cloud", they are not really learning cloud as much as following tutorials to click together turnkey solutions. Dynamo DB, ElasicSearch, and whatever else are all business-oriented, quick to set up services. And such, these services are hiding what is going on underneath, with the expectation that the company will cover the costs of whatever those services run. This is a standard buisness practice. If you want to learn how to put together cloud solutions with those technologies involved, you don't even need an AWS account. All you need is a decent laptop or a desktop, with docker or VM software, where you install everything yourself and learn how to configure it (since all of the software is free), do all the networking yourself. This is what actually learning the cloud involves and translating those skills to AWS is very easy. Perhaps the blame is on the universities and/or tutorials that push the students towards creating free AWS accounts, but regardless, there should be some incentive to takes one profession seriously so you don't end up making this mistake in a company that will not have protections in place that people want for free tier. And money is as good as incentive as any. Id rather people be smarter rather than treat ignorance as a standard and put blame on others for not expecting people to be ignorant.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    • nemothekid 5y ago
• kossTKR 5y ago
  Lots of companies also gets hacked each month for thousands of dollars because some key to S3 with too many privileges gets leaked. The entire system is completely sinister. The fact that keys pertaining to S3 has anything do with being able to start hundreds of VM's in different parts of the AWS system or do whatever is bad. I've seen companies be ruined by this, and it's in no way obvious how stupid their system is. You have to read huge manuals to know how to "only give access to s3" through a key. Instead of starting with "no access" then adding atomized access you have to understand this extremely complex "json privilege system". Instead of just programming, this is the only allowed IP, the is the only allowed bucket, this is the only allowed service, and my max is 200usd, or something to that effect. Also the fact that a key can start new services that are billable is almost criminal in my mind when people don't even gen an email when it happens - makes zero sense.
  • ficklepickle 5y ago
    > You have to read huge manuals to know how to "only give access to s3" through a key I have to disagree with this. It really is pretty straight forward.[0] [0] - https://objectivefs.com/howto/how-to-restrict-s3-bucket-policy-to-only-one-aws-s3-bucket https://objectivefs.com/howto/how-to-restrict-s3-bucket-poli...
  • simonw 5y ago
    The feature I most want from AWS is a simple way to create credentials that are only allowed to read from or write to a specific S3 bucket. The way you do this at the moment genuinely involves copying and pasting JSON policy documents around! It's horrific. I want this for myself, but more importantly I want it for users of software that I write. I would love to be able to build something that stores a user's data in an S3 bucket that they own (and are billed for directly) - but it's currently just too difficult to talk them through setting up the bucket and creating the right credentials for it.
    • quantico 5y ago
      They simply have to be in separate AWS accounts for this to work. To that end, you can provide them with a CloudFormation template that deploys a stack with the necessary configuration.
• ipaddr 5y ago
  I tried signing up with a prepaid credit card and they refused the card so I moved on. It's setup for massive profits on minor mistakes. The risk on a free tier is like shorting a stock, one bad day and you go bankrupt unless you have a connected twitter account. Sounds like a new dystopian future that is best not to be part of. When IBM ruled or Microsoft or AOL things you had one main evil corp. We're in a period where Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook can appear the hero or villian depending on the day but the sum of the faangs is much greater than the worst evils of the original megacorps. Could you envision forced unlimited billing on a free tier with no ability to limit charges on the account?
  • vxNsr 5y ago
    Use a temp number card. Either privacy.com or Citi cc also offers this feature
    • ipaddr 5y ago
      It is only available to US citizens.
• userbinator 5y ago
  When you realise that their whole business model is around extracting as much $$$ from users as they can, you should be entirely unsurprised by how AWS and other cloud providers behave. My cynical side is inclined to say "see, this is what you get for using cloud computing". Cloud providers are the very definition of nickel-and-diming. I still remember the amusement of finding out that AWS has Cost Management services, which themselves have a cost.
• Silhouette 5y ago
  The crazy thing is, this obvious (to anyone experienced in business, at least) danger must be costing AWS money. I personally know of small businesses who have entirely avoided AWS even though it might have been a good fit for their needs in most respects, entirely because of concerns about the opacity of the billing and the inability to add safeguards in case something goes wrong. Some of those businesses are no longer small, either. AWS does have a reputation, at least among those more familiar with cloud services, for being reasonable about unexpected charges and probably putting something right if it was obviously not intended. But in that case, they aren't even pulling some sort of dark pattern scam to make more money here, and the lack of last resort safety features makes even less sense...
• ineedasername 5y ago
  I don't understand why there isn't at least a setting that says "turn everything off if I hit $x." Then just given people a certain grace period to reactivate or get their data out before it's removed. It wouldn't fix production deployments where you want alarms, not a shutdown, when you hit spending caps, but it would help people on the dev stage to avoid issues like this.
  • runawaybottle 5y ago
    Because, buster, newsflash: AWS is for enterprise and enterprise startups and wannabe startups that seek vanity milestones (‘we are in the cloud’). It’s not for your broke ass that needs to turn the tap off at a certain price point lol.
  • paulpauper 5y ago
    becase the billing proces is seprate from the other processes
    • hatchoo 5y ago
      Can't they just throw an event to EventBridge
    • MereInterest 5y ago
      That sounds like Amazon taking one of their problems and pushing it onto the users. If the root limitation is that Amazon's billing process is so poor that it can't interact with their other processes, then that should be Amazon's problem to fix. Until and unless Amazon fixes their own problem, Amazon should be eating the cost resulting from Amazon allocating server usage beyond a user-specified maximum billing.
  • scarface74 5y ago
    So let’s say they “turn everything off”. Does that include deleting all of your objects in S3? Deleting your database? Deleting your attached disks (AMIs)? Deleting your DNS entries?
• okareaman 5y ago
  When I read about the myriad predatory practices of Amazon I think about who the predator is and the saying "the fish rots from the head." I'm looking forward to the day Jeff Bezos pays the price for being the predator that he is.
  • lazide 5y ago
    He’s already left - you’re going to be waiting a long time.
    • okareaman 5y ago
      He's moved from chief executive to executive chairman. In no sense has he 'left'
      • lazide 5y ago
        He’s out of the crosshairs, and there is someone else running the show - they may end up reporting to him, but similar to Bill Gates and ballmer; spotlight isn’t on him anymore and he’s not making the day to day calls anymore.
  • labster 5y ago
    He already lost half his wealth to his ex-wife, what more are you waiting for?
    • okareaman 5y ago
      He's probably glad he's no longer married to his ex and he's still a mega billionaire. Not much punishment.
      • Aeolun 5y ago
        Infinite money / 2 = still infinite
• yawnxyz 5y ago
  I've stayed away from AWS for these reasons. Instead I use systems on top of AWS, like Vercel etc. Is it ironic that Amazon's mantra is to be "Customer obsessed" yet AWS is so magnificently confusing for anyone not doing it full-time? As a designer I've used plenty of Digital Ocean, Vercel, Cloudflare Workers and other static hosts without a problem... I've never been able to figure out how to even start on AWS, and all these horror stories constantly make sure I stay away
  • UglyToad 5y ago
    I'm so miserable that I finally got around to embracing open ecosystems after almost a decade of being Microsoft-poisoned and now everyone is all in on some baffling walled garden with abysmal UX and about 300 different services that you need a damn NASA PhD to understand. Like the number of times I find myself in some random service/feature/part of AWS like "do we use one of these? how would I even tell?".
  • scarface74 5y ago
    I know AWS well. In fact I work at AWS in ProServe. But, I have run up a “bill” on my internal personal accounts before. If I were ever going to do a personal project that wasn’t appropriate for serverless, I would just use LightSail. https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/ https://aws.amazon.com/lightsail/
• base3 5y ago
  Me too! I use AWS all day at work, so I should be able to find the service that charges my personal account 64 cents per month... :shrug: I'm glad that student got help.
• sunsipples 5y ago
  At one point I tried using AWS trial for an app, didn't work out, cancelled the account (or so I thought) only to find 2 years later some charges to my bank of $2k and when I spoke to AWS support, there was another $4k accruing for this billing period. Took ages to sort out, while they eventually did refund the amount, I was still out of pocket exchange fees (X2) the exchange rate also meant I was out more money. In total I think having a compromised yet closed AWS free trial cost me $350 over a 6week period some 2 years after closing it.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• HumblyTossed 5y ago
  > Corey Quinn, your first and last stop for any question that touches AWS billing, has called for an updated free tier that treats “personal learning” AWS accounts differently from “new corporate” accounts, and sets hard billing limits that you can’t exceed. This would be good. I don't normally do "cloud" stuff. It's just not my skill set. But I have looked at it on occasion and one thing that turns me off is my inability to know if I'm going to fuck myself with a large bill from some of these services.
  • _carbyau_ 5y ago
    +1 Same boat. I don't know how to work with AWS. I don't want to pay $$$ for a "course" for something that I can explore with a "free" tier. I logged onto AWS. Looked around, figured I had no idea what I would be charged and what the "free" tier meant I could do exactly. So I logged out and haven't been back.
  • xyzzy_plugh 5y ago
    Yeah this is a huge problem. I suspect this is significant for people to choose inferior non-hosted alternatives just for peace of mind. Hard limits would probably create a large influx of users. Even for something as simple as S3, I'm hesitant to use the real service during development because it's so easy to stack up charges. For one of my accounts, the usual bill is <$10 but last month it was $27 because there was some network flakiness that resulted in excessive transfer.
  • stjohnswarts 5y ago
    Yes,they should totally have a high water mark "trigger" so you could set a shutoff for $100 or whatever.
• paulpauper 5y ago
  aws free tier is a joke anyway. surprise billing even after minimal usage and they shutdown your account if you forget to pay or the credit card billing info does not work . If it is truly free, why do they need your credit card.
• kl13nt 5y ago
  As a student trying out the AWS platform (I'm not even a devops/backend/anything related to it) I found it painful to use when compared to other providers. They keep building new products that build on existing products such as Elastic Beanstalk that assigns a LOT of resources you don't even need to host a nodejs app, etc. Even reaching the billing panel was painful. You have to go through at least 3 screens just to get to the "billing" screen. And then you have to browse inside of that to reach your bills. It's disgusting.
• adamparsons 5y ago
  I cancelled an account 2 years ago because no matter how much I explored cost manager or any regions I used, I can't find why I still get billed a small dollar or so a month. I still get bills on the 3rd of each month, followed by a "we can't charge your card" (I removed it when they pulled this shit) followed by a few days later you get the "hey we're gonna suspend your account if you don't pay" Yeah cool, I only closed the account 2 years ago now, go right ahead and suspend/close/do whatever you've gotta do, I stopped caring.
  • sixothree 5y ago
    The cost explorer is beyond deplorable. It provides either too little information or information that is so fine-grained it becomes useless. It infuriates me the hoops we need to jump through just to understand how much a single virtual machine costs. Or in cases like yours - to find out what resource a charge was for. Impossible. Designed to be impossible. FFS. We would spend more money if we were able to manage costs better.
  • tomwojcik 5y ago
    Same! I literally closed an account and created a new one after a few months because I was charged a few bucks a month and I didn't know what I was paying for. I think it was either related to db backup or some encryption keys but I couldnt find what and where to delete to get rid of this charge. Nowadays I use aws only for route53 and s3.
  • tomerv 5y ago
    Same here. I had a monthly billing of a few dollars and couldn't figure out where it's coming from (and given that it's only a few dollars, it wouldn't make sense to spend many hours investigating). In the end I just canceled the card and hoped for the best.
  • dennis_jeeves 5y ago
    Came in to say I had to do the same thing, close i.e an account to stop being charged.
• forrestbrazeal 5y ago
  Author here. I just updated the post with an additional idea for fixing the free tier, suggested by several readers. It turns out there is a non-widely-known program called AWS Educate Starter Accounts [0], which give no-credit-card access to a limited but useful subset of AWS services. The problem is that you can only get access to these accounts through student affiliation with a participating educational institution like a high school or university. It might be more feasible to expand this program, say to any applicant who demonstrates some reasonable threshold of non-bot-ness, than to re-engineer the normal free tier. To any AWS people reading this: I believe this could be a useful step toward solving the free tier problem, and would be happy to be a sounding board. [0] https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/aws-educate-faqs/ https://aws.amazon.com/education/awseducate/aws-educate-faqs...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• agogdog 5y ago
  They know, they just don't care that much. I've heard second hand that part of the reason is due to the internal politics between different divisions within AWS.
• civilized 5y ago
  Anyone who asks you for a credit card or other means to bill you for a "free" service intends to steal money from you without your consent
  • rataata_jr 5y ago
    Its not stealing. You are using their services for free now which can / will be charged later.
• pirsquare 5y ago
  This is the problem with usage based pricing. It is very lucrative pricing strategy because it works for lower end of market as well as enterprise users. One way to resolve this is to offer fixed tier based pricing for customers who may be more sensitive to prices and usage based pricing for enterprise clients. For example. Starter ($5/mo) - Use up to 100,000 API calls each month. Growth ($30/mo) - Use up to 1,000,000 API calls each month. Enterprise ($149/mo) - Use up to 10,000,000 API calls each month. After that, $10 for every 1 million calls.
• jiggawatts 5y ago
  Everyone: PLEASE stop making the argument that it's "too hard" or even "impossible" to implement spending limits. As the article points out: Every other cloud does this! They all have non-production subscription types with hard spending limits. There's a difference between "unable" and "unwilling". The people that refuse to understand the difference are the same people that don't understand that "unsupported" isn't synonymous with "cannot be made to function". Don't be that person. If you have a large account and you're in regular contact with an AWS sales representative, pressure them into making this happen. Even if you work for Megacorp with a $$$ budget, keep in mind that your future hires need to start somewhere, need to be able to learn on their own, and need to do so safely. Don't walk down the same path as IBM's mainframes, where no student anywhere ever has been able to learn on their own, making it a dead-end for corporations who pay billions for this platform. You, or your company will eventually pay this price if AWS keeps this IBM-like behaviour up. Think of the big picture, not just your own immediate personal situation. Apply this pressure yourself, because the students you want to hire next year can't.
  • dinkleberg 5y ago
    Which clouds do this? I work quite a bit with AWS and GCP, and Azure to a lesser extent, and I've yet to see a spending limit on any of them. I'd love to be proven wrong though.
    • mcny 5y ago
      I had (have?) an Azure account through my university account and while I agree that Azure services such as Container Service are (in my not so humble opinion) ridiculously overpriced but the fact it I never entered payment details to use my USD 100 of free credit on Azure. I effectively have spending cap of zero dollars.
      • wingworks 5y ago
        I thought I was the only one who thought pricing on Azure seemed rather high for what you get. But I also have free credit I can use each month, which offsets the cost to "normal" levels, but can't imagine being a business and opting to pay for Azure services by choice, unless they provide something no one else does.
• manigandham 5y ago
  A major problem is that there's no easy way to see all resources in a single view for any cloud. Azure comes closest in the dashboard but still misses some items. GCP has an Asset Inventory page in the Security section for an organization. AWS can use the Tag Editor to browse all the regions. It's notable that none of them have a single clear page though.
• commandlinefan 5y ago
  > It was ‘just’ $200, that’s not the end of the world A $200 charge would have been devastating to me when I was in college. As in, I may have to beg for food devastating.
• whoknowswhat11 5y ago
  Goodness - reading these statements makes me laugh - "sinister" "evil" "by design". Reality - very few folks want a hard billing limit. To stop charging you AWS would need to delete all your EBS and S3 volumes, stop all EC2 instances, release all public IP's, delete all AWS directories and the list goes on. The idea that AWS would build this giant data loss footgun into their system is ridiculous. Somewhere in AWS someone said, how could this blow up, and they came up with 100 ways, including misconfigured cost accounting etc. That said, the GCP project based model makes more sense to me, give you more control etc. That said, if there is such demand for hard billing limit playgrounds (I'm sure there is but not by folks giving AWS a lot of money), someone should be able to do a hosted solution for AWS that bills into their corp account and gives you a playground for learning (with a real hard billing limit). That type of approach is used in a lot of other contexts already.
  • paranoidrobot 5y ago
    AWS employs a whole lot of brilliant people, and they're an insanely profitable business unit. I'm sure those people, given the appropriate motivation and opportunity, could provide a solution (or several) that avoids foot-gun data loss at every turn. There's all sort of solutions they could go with. As an idea, perhaps some kind of functionality within the billing side of things: They could, perhaps, decide to just apply a basic cap functionality - when you reach that cap, it stops/disables all chargeable resources above the free-tier and gives you 72 hours to go raise the cap or they'll delete everything except things in their AWS Backup. AWS can eat the storage cost for the stopped things without a noticable impact on revenue. Perhaps a more advanced workflow-type setup: When monthly spend reaches $x across all regions: - stop all running instances that are not below the free-tier limit - apply deny policies for per-request charged services - send an email alert to the billing, tech and admin contacts. When monthly spend reaches $y across all regions: - Delete all chargable resources not tagged with 'Foo: bar' - send an email alert to the billing, tech and admin contacts. One of the other things that would be great, is to be able to apply limits to AWS Accounts. For instance, the AWS Account that we give to developers to experiment on, it would be great to forbid them from starting baremetal instances, or GPU instances, etc. Some of it can be controlled through deny rules, but not enough. Billing alerts are also currently nowhere near responsive enough - it can be hours or days before you get told that some resource is running up your bill. A comprehensive dashboard of 'here is every chargeable resource running in this account, in all regions, right now' wouldn't go astray, either.
• Waterluvian 5y ago
  Last month I woke up to an amazon alert that our usually $5000 monthly bill was $125 000. I ran to my computer too fast to have time for a panic attack. Turns out my company bought some services through AWS and it was all kosher. I wish it wasn't possible to rack up such a bill by accident so I don't have to worry.
• mjthompson 5y ago
  Oracle - of all businesses - got this right. I know, I'm in shock too. In Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, after your credit is exhausted, you have to explicitly opt in to billing or else they stop all paid services for you. Moreover, you can choose to keep billing disabled and use their free services without fear of unknown costs. AWS have just decided to run with a policy of offering refunds when people make mistakes. Unfortunately, some people are ignorant of this, or too timid to ask for their money back.
  • perryizgr8 5y ago
    Wow this is amazing! Never thought Oracle would have such a nice free tier. > 2 Compute virtual machines with 1/8 OCPU and 1 GB memory each. > 2 Block Volumes Storage, 100 GB total. > 10 GB Object Storage. > 10 GB Archive Storage. > Resource Manager: managed Terraform.
    • Havoc 5y ago
      >Never thought Oracle would have such a nice free tier. Attracted a fair bit of attention in some corners of the internet for this reason. Then they canned a bunch of accounts using "always free" stuff for myself and others. Do not trust.
  • Aeolun 5y ago
    > Unfortunately, some people are ignorant of this, or too timid to ask for their money back. I guess that turns out to be good for AWS’s bottom line.
  • namelessoracle 5y ago
    Might just be an urban legend but doesnt Amazon keep track of people who do too many refunds and cancel services with them? I've heard of and met people who dont do minor returns to Amazon because they were afraid it would put their Prime account on some kind of "naughty list"
• up6w6 5y ago
  I want to point out that I just tried to access my AWS Educate Account today to explore the panels and found: "ALERT-1: Session time behavior and instance types in your Starter Account will be changing on May 11th, 2021. After this date: 1. When your session ends, your resources will be “stopped.” You will be required to re-start your resources when you start a new session. 2. Updates will be made to available instance types. We recommend you to complete currently running work in your Starter Account by May 10th, 2021 as work using instance types that are no longer supported will be lost after that date." Im still thinking about what can I do with 3 hours (duration of a session) of EC2 computing power...
• siwatanejo 5y ago
  That's why I use cloud providers that accept bitcoin. Credit cards are evil.
• WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  The issue here is really Billing... AWS Budgets allows you to set a budget as far down as $1 USD... however because billing is done piecemeal, it is possible to have up to 24 hour delay for charges... You can spend $500,000 on AWS in 24 hours, it's not difficult, it's not easy but you totally can blow past your "budget" because it's not a hard cap.
• jrockway 5y ago
  This is something I think about a lot. For work, I run a cloud service, and being able to accomodate students (and other cost-sensitive users) like the one in the post is important to me. I've always thought that letting people experiment over the weekend is what leads to people wanting to use something at work (where the real budget is), and I think that supporting those users is how you build a userbase of advocates. Maybe they can't afford (or justify) the enterprise plan quite yet, but they can still be a happy user and cheer on those that can justify the expense. I've personally found that it can be hard to get the approval to type in your company credit card until you've done enough research to prove that something is going to be worth the money. That leads to a chicken and the egg problem; people won't be confident until they've paid, but they can't gain that confidence until they pay! So you have to get the small "testing" use case perfect, or you'll never have any real customers. (My corollary to this is because AWS already has your company credit card, and you already have "root" or similar because of your role, it sure is easy to build whatever you want there. If AWS provides some service, you can start using it and the cost will be lost in the noise. But if it's not on AWS, then you'll have to produce some justification to use the service before you can start paying for it. I ran into that a lot at my last job; I wanted to buy $5/month services like Sentry but was told no, whereas other people could just create a m4.4xlarge RDS instance for $1000/month and nobody even noticed or cared. People really like being approvers at the time of entering the credit card, rather than at the time of actual cost accrual, and cloud providers really facilitate that. Not sure that's really helping those approvers -- it almost feels a little bit like embezzlement.) Anyway, ranting aside, here's what we do for the cloud service I work on: 1) We have a free tier. It's really free; you don't even get to enter a credit card. Sign in and start doing your work. (We delete your stuff after 4 hours, though.) 2) For the paid tier, all costs are pay as you go. The instant you click "delete workspace", no more costs accrue. Merely having an account open doesn't accrue any costs for you, and there is no way to create a phantom resource that you can't see in the UI and delete. If you delete everything, billing is over. One weakness that I'd like to fix is the latency between resource use and when we tell you about it. That takes a few days, so if you are playing with aggressive autoscaling, you don't really know what it's going to cost until your experiment is over. I'd like to collect real-time usage data and just bill based off of that, so that the UI can update you within seconds of your job starting. If it's too much, you can just pull the plug and not be surprised. The next step is letting people pre-pay, and do what the vast majority of comments on this thread want: kill the compute resources when the budget is exceeded. My thought is that it's hard to ask your customers for money upfront, which is probably where the post-pay model originated. I personally always have reservations about buying 3 year reserved instances from cloud providers, even if it saves a ton of money. "What if we stop using it tomorrow!?" But there is probably a good compromise here: type into the UI what you'd like to pay for autoscaling per month, and once that budget it exceeded, run at the bare minimum "keep the lights on" level. More difficult than the alternative, but certainly possible. And very good for users -- no total outage, no unexpected bill they have no hope of being able to pay. Things are just slower for a while. Anyway, I don't know what the perfect formula for cloud pricing is -- but it's clear that what AWS has is not quite right, and that we can probably do better. To paraphrase Jeff Bezos ("your margin is my opportunity"), what AWS has consistently done wrong for years is your chance to make it better and get paid for doing so.
• reilly3000 5y ago
  AWS represents over 60% of the net profit of the entire Amazon empire across all its divisions and acquisitions. If they truly helped the customer to waste less money, it would have a massive impact on everyone who has stock, from sovereign funds to junior engineers. They have a vested interest in dinging your sandbox account $1/month for storing secrets you haven’t used in 2 years. I don’t see this changing anytime soon, especially when the competition is no better.
  • sixothree 5y ago
    We would definitely spend more money on AWS services if our company could feel more secure in understanding which project those costs were associated with and were able to track the costs without spending multiple hours.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• hannofcart 5y ago
  > ...an updated free tier that treats “personal learning” AWS accounts differently from “new corporate” accounts, and sets hard billing limits that you can’t exceed. Honestly, this is needed for corporate accounts as well. Not all companies are FAANG scale behemoths who can shrug off an unexpected charge. For a scrappy startup in India, an unexpected $5000 bill would be an existential threat.
  • andrewmcwatters 5y ago
    A scrappy startup in India is not AWS' ICP.
    • paranoidrobot 5y ago
      A scrappy startup in <any country> could see an unexpected $5k bill as business-ending. It's so absurdly easy to run up massive bills, and there's few controls, and practically useless alerting - so you can't rely on that. Someone spun up a 3 node m5.xlarge RDS Cluster with SQL Server Standard? I hope you notice quickly, 'cause that's going to be >$5k/month. They don't show a minimum monthly cost for any of these things, either. No, you're assumed to be okay with unlimited charges, and are left to your own devices to figure it out.
    • hannofcart 5y ago
      Not sure why, but they courted our company right from the beginning: got in touch with us within a month of us forming up, gave us a generous free startup credit, even invited us over to their Bangalore office and helped us with how we can optimize our infra. Thankfully, the company reached profitability so we pay them rather hefty bills now. But I guess I agree with you in that that's not a typical startup's trajectory, and their ROI from the aforementioned outreach is likely relatively low on average so am wondering now why they went out of the way to help us.
• slics 5y ago
  I used the free tier account to play around for a while. I thought I had deleted everything before the end of the year free tier. I was wrong! For 2 months I paid $10 as I could not figure it out what the heck was running. I had to close my account in order to stop the charges. Today when I hear anyone speak of AWS free tier for a year, first thing I warn them about is to make sure they keep track of what they create so they will know what to delete, otherwise they will keep buying Starbucks every month to AWS.
• banana_giraffe 5y ago
  The thing that always gets me: I _think_ some of this is a solved problem within AWS. I've never used it before, but the AWS Educate "offers students no-cost access to a specified, capped amount of AWS cloud resources without requiring a credit card for payment". That sounds a lot like what I want a free tier to be. Let me play for a bit, set hard guard rails so I can't accidently spend $100, or much much worse. I mean, I can understand requiring a CC to do this, but that's mostly so I don't spin up a ton of free accounts and also so the friction to going to a paid plan is lower. It's too late for me, my personal AWS account is well outside of the free tier, but the first time I spun on a large instance to test it out I was so insanely nervous I'd screw up and end up with a huge bill. I can totally see someone else backing out at that point out of fear, but if I knew I'd hit the guardrail before spending money, even if it meant losing an instance, I'd have totally be happier to play around.
• StratusBen 5y ago
  I'm Co-Founder of http://vantage.sh/ http://vantage.sh/ and we allow you to connect your AWS account(s) and we'll monitor cloud spend on your behalf. We send out regular cost report emails to try and help folks avoid situations like this and have some future plans around anomaly detection to try and help out in advance of things like this happening. I strongly encourage folks to sign up and let us monitor things on your behalf. We have a free tier that likely covers a lot of personal users here.
  • Havoc 5y ago
    Is it essentially read only / limited in some fashion by IAM? Wouldn't really want more things connected that open up more threat surface
• sprynr 5y ago
  I had a class last semester where we were required to use AWS. Our professor tried his best to teach everyone how to be responsible with their tool use and how to predict their costs (As well as how to set up a free education account and get AWS credits). I was amazed when final presentations rolled around my group had a total cost of 4.30 dollars after 5 months of uptime and use, while other groups had costs ranging from 30 to 150 dollars! I use AWS for my job so I guess I just never really went through those growing pains, but no system should be that easy to rack up costs unknowingly.
• mikesabbagh 5y ago
  debugged a terraform script on my personal aws, I got a bill of ~100$ for the past 2 months. It seems i had eks still running without nodes!! Why would a service allow to have eks without nodes? Will call support to get a refund!
• jacobsimon 5y ago
  Just speaking from personal anecdotes, every time I’ve accidentally been charged for something on AWS that I didn’t intend, their support team has refunded me without much hassle. Things may have changed in recent times but I’ve found them to be pretty reasonable about it.
• ROARosen 5y ago
  I had a similar experience, with costs of $100 incurred over a four-month period. All it took was on email to AWS support, and they refunded the entire thing. I was impressed, but still have been really trying to keep off AWS just to not have a mistaken repeat.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• darthrupert 5y ago
  The author starts eith comparing a $200 buck charge that AWS support roller back to somebody losing or imagining to lose $100K in trading. Wild juxtapositions there. After seeing how recklessly people use AWS when it's not their own wallet on the line, I'll wager to say that this 20-year old learned a valuablr lesson.
• grumpyautist 5y ago
  This is the reason I closed my aws account and gave up on learning their services. Intentional cost obfuscation means I have no interest in doing business with someone
• throwawaydg 5y ago
  We were inexperienced, got picked up by a tiny VC and funded for a few thousand. We applied and got accepted into the Digital Ocean Hatch program, they threw $100,000 in credits at us to help us succeed. We tried to exhaust the supply—one day the credits vanished. I was getting married that month, and it took that long to accrue a life-changing amount of real dollar debt. I sent a quick email asking DO to extend the credits. The last email I got from them was that "we expect you pay the full amount".
• taftster 5y ago
  Another solution to this problem is the availability of disposable credit cards. It would be ideal that credit card numbers could just be created from scratch, as needed, and turned off whenever the use was done. We had promises of this as ecommerce took off, to help avoid fraud. But it seems these don't get widespread adoption, probably because purchases are easy to get chargebacks for (in general). A hard limit for cloud purchases is surely needed. But because the cloud providers aren't giving us this, I'm wondering if a solution like disposable cards could?
  • gruez 5y ago
    1. Does aws even accept prepaid cards? many providers don't dye to fraud/abuse concerns 2. Your payment method refusing to accept charges doesn't mean you're still not on the hook for them. Technically they can still send your bill to collections and wreck your credit report. They probably don't do this, but it's still a bad bandaid solution
    • taftster 5y ago
      Good thoughts/questions, thanks. 1. Not sure, but I think that's the problem I'm asking about. Because prepaid or auto-generated cards are not mainstream, big vendors don't need to accept them. 2. Agreed, but at least this puts one more layer of control back to the owner. AWS doesn't have my birthdate or social security info (US), so it would be harder (not impossible) for them to "wreck your credit report". At least this approach puts an extra barrier in the equation.
• young_unixer 5y ago
  Can anyone recommend a cloud provider that's suitable for learning (the opposite of AWS in this regard)?
  • danielmeskin 5y ago
    Plain old Linux: Free: GCP Paid (but cheap): Linode, DigitalOcean —- Machine Learning: Free: Google CoLab, Paperspace Gradient Paid (but [relatively] cheap): JarvisLabs, DataCrunch —- Databases and user auth: Free: Firebase spark Paid (but cheap, remember to set billing alerts!): Firebase blaze
• trog 5y ago
  Please just let me set a hard budget that caps my spending.
• fmakunbound 5y ago
  Feel like it's a good cloud learning experience for the student though.
• anonytrary 5y ago
  Can confirm. Default ElastiCache clustering option chooses an extremely high compute node, I ended up accidentally spending $1300 in a month just for testing some Redis clustering script. The minimum option ends up only costing a few dozen dollars a month. The billing alert did not even trigger until the very end of the month, so I got a $1300 surprise. I complained about it to AWS, mentioning how misleading their shit was, and they ended up refunding me $800. Still -- a $500 mistake anyone could make at 11pm. They also made it extra clear in their response that they are not legally obligated to refund me, and that they were doing it out of the kindness of their hearts. AWS console is some next level outdated shit that needs to be improved. GCP's console is way cleaner IMO. I really hope AWS fixed this after this happened to me, but somehow I doubt they did.
  • Draken93 5y ago
    Damn, I can't imagine how you felt... Only the unique experiences in this thread are enough to know how f*cked up AWS billing is.
    • anonytrary 5y ago
      Felt like a complete idiot, I guess I'm not smart enough to use AWS's UI in a safe way. When we start trusting tools, we inevitably become complacent. Some user flows are designed to be gotcha's. A little gotcha machine that generates |cost - refund| revenue. They gotcha, and there's nothing you can do about it but beg them for a (usually partial) refund. The refund is the thing that makes you feel better about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      • Draken93 5y ago
        Thats exactly the impression I got when I was reading the AWS docs. I am a student too and was evaluating AWS for a hobby project. Reading the docs I got the feeling that the product is designed for big cooperations only. But not for someone who wants real price control. The free account just made no sense to me. I ended up renting a cloud server ~3€ a month. (Not AWS) Looking at this thread this was the best decision I could make.
• ashneo76 5y ago
  AWS is not the cloud. There are others. Please try something else. As someone with extensive professional experience with it day in and out, it is overrated. Also, the cloud is someone else's computer. It is either AWS or GCP or something else. Move to what works, for you.
• tmk1108 5y ago
  I had an account with AWS about 6 years for a small prototype and I closed it after using it for 1 month. However for some reason I got an email last November about a change to some certificates for either S3 or Cloudfront because my account used one of those services in the last 6 months. I don't know if this is a mistake on their part, but I haven't been charged in the last 6 years or gotten any emails before that. But it's still worrying because the account is closed and I have no way through standard support to know why they think my account was using their services
• codazoda 5y ago
  "There's money in confusion" - Rulan Clark That quote is what I think about when I see cloud hosting pricing models. Rulan was the late co-founder of Clark's Pine Factory in Northern Utah and my first boss in the 1990's.
• 0xmohit 5y ago
  This appears to be by design. People have been demanding a budget capping service [0] for a decade now. AWS would continue to bill for compromised accounts [1]. AWS "free" offerings can cost a lot more than you think [2]. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3356987 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3356987 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20045615 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20045615 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22988647 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22988647
• uglygoblin 5y ago
  AWS was charging me 0.50¢ a month for over a year for an account that was tied to a Google Suite email address for a failed startup I was part of. I couldn't recover access to the account. They couldn't figure how to give me access. They wouldn't just remove my credit card from the account. One month the charge became $10 so I called my bank and had them block AWS charges. It seemed the only way to deal with the fear that someday that would creep up and up.
• sebasvisser 5y ago
  I thought I was just to incompetent to figure out how to stop an instance…so I just gave up while watching my creditcard getting billed for about €20 each month.. Last month I went full on and spent a few hours removing everything on every screen I could find. After many hours of failing to remove an instance because you have to stop a thingie from auto starting on another screen first…and another thingie from running there. I finally managed to remove all the instances… Then two months later, I still get a bill for a few €… I give up. I Hate Amazon
  • top_kekeroni_m8 5y ago
    You can try using this tool: https://github.com/iann0036/former2 https://github.com/iann0036/former2 This will scan your entire account and list all of your resources - it's actually made for generating CloudFormation templates, but it's very useful for a use-case like yours.
  • quesera 5y ago
    I'll bet you created the environment with Elastic Beanstalk, whose job it is to (among other things) replace instances if they fail. When you stopped the instance in EC2, EB did its job and created a new instance. You eventually figured this out and killed the EB env, and the instances stopped reappearing. But the Elastic IP address assigned to your EB env is still on your account, and it's no longer free of charge, because you don't have a running instance. So you will be billed about a €/mo until you delete the Elastic IP reservation. This is ridiculously confusing, and ridiculously common.
• Camillo 5y ago
  Yes, there should be easier ways for learners to experiment with AWS without risk. In general, people should be made aware of how much something could cost them before they can agree with it. We have regulations towards this end when it comes to investments. Huge unexpected bills used to be a big problem with phone companies, and it took a lot of effort to move past it. I hope the cloud industry can make progress in this direction. What I'm going to say next should not be taken to detract from that in any way. (And I know you don't want to hear it, and I could just save everyone some trouble and not say it. But I'm going to say it.) When I read this: > please help I made a ticket and called support but i really need to make sure this is dead please Im 20 i really dont have $200 for them please help I honestly did a double take when I got to the "20". If you'd put a blank in there and asked me to fill it, I would have said "13". I'm still not 100% sure that the blogger didn't alter the age to obfuscate personal details. I don't mean to single out this person as especially immature, quite the opposite: the interesting thing is that they assume that a 20 year old is obviously a smol bean who could not possibly be expected to figure out AWS billing or come up with $200, _and we agree_. The notion didn't stand out as surprising to the blogger, or to any of the other commenters on HN so far. I'm not saying they're wrong! I just find this a remarkable signal of how far we, as a culture, have gone in extending childhood well into college age.
• TheChaplain 5y ago
  I am very happy this thread came up, because I'm looking at cloud providers to experiement with. So many comments about charges that show up despite resources removed or even deleted accounts, tells me that AWS can not be trusted to present me the full picture of costs.
• compsciphd 5y ago
  20+ years ago I was offered a free 2 or 3 month subscription to compuserve. I was interested in it, as one could dial in as PPP account for internet access. So I configured my linux box to dial in and if the connection dropped, to redial. After the 2nd month I get a huge multi hundred dollar bill. They claimed over the the 2 months I had used 2k-3k hours of time an their free months were limited to 750 hours a month of usage. As I pointed out, that should be enough, as 24*31 = 744, so it should be impossible for me to use more than 750 hours a month. They claimed that I must have been dialing in from multiple locations. I denied that and said they should have records of where I was calling in from. It took weeks for them to "forgive" the debt, without acknowledging that their billing was broken. I always wondered how many other users got hurt because of this (my guess is not that many, as relatively few people were keeping their connection alive 24/7 via compuserve back in the 90s)
• raverbashing 5y ago
  I agree with most of the points brought there except for: > I’ve personally got a dormant AWS account that’s charging me cents every month, and I bet you do too. Hummm no? And if I have a charge line and I can try to chase it. It's not like that cent is nameless, it has a name and it has a way of figuring it out? I mean, it can be not so obvious but it's not like it's totally opaque neither
• Draken93 5y ago
  I am a student in the same age. When I wanted to start a hobby project I looked into the AWS free tier too. It is so unclear how the end costs come together that I decided to just leave AWS alone. I rented a small cloud instance from HETZNER for ~ 3€/month and host everything myself. If I need a DBaaS I go with the MongoDB Atlas or ElephantSQL free tier. I prefer constantly paying 3€, over a free account that breaks my neck if I miss something.
• wraptile 5y ago
  One hack I've learned once I got burned by similar service is to always use virtual debit card with a spending limit if your bank supports one. I have a virtual card on Revolut dedicated to small subscriptions that freezes at 100$/month to prevent this sort of fraud.
• Aeolun 5y ago
  Isn’t there a service that does something like this? I’d think by this point someone had made a business out of it if it was a serious problem.
• dom96 5y ago
  This is precisely the reason I have avoided AWS as a student and to this day I prefer providers that have clear billing like DO. I don’t understand why anyone would use AWS when there is a risk of being charged stupid amounts of money if you screw something up. Are there advantages to AWS that I’m not seeing?
• shever 5y ago
  This. 100% this. I have had issues with students doing the same thing, and I was being charged for dormant projects that I thought I'd deleted. AWS is a nightmare of an ecosystem to navigate. The AWS Educate Starter Account is almost useless - especially if the student has to submit their project for external review - because it doesn't allow publicly accessible S3 buckets and has rotating credentials.
• putsjoe 5y ago
  I don't get why AWS doesn't offer preloading credit. Surely charging your card 1 cent a month isn't worth the time. Whereas if they allowed customers to load on an amount, even a direct debit, their card processing fees would go down and customers would just get cut off when they run out of credit. I suppose a counter argument to this is that it's hard for AWS to keep a constant eye on how much a service is costing. In which case we're back to the same argument as spending limits.
• mmmuhd 5y ago
  I was hit by unplanned $43 aws bill three days ago, in our Nigerian economy $43 is a lot of money, I am still grieving.
• deleted 5y ago
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• kaydub 5y ago
  I'm in agreement with the cloud providers over those of you wanting a hard shutdown. Businesses, the entities that are paying the most money to AWS, will NOT want a hard shutdown. When you generate revenue off of your SaaS service maybe you'll understand. No, I won't be pushing my TAM to enable a forced shutdown due to budget metrics. Not to mention, how does AWS decide what to shutdown and what to delete? It's not like it's only running resources that cost money, what about all my data that's stored???
  • jawns 5y ago
    > Businesses, the entities that are paying the most money to AWS, will NOT want a hard shutdown. I don't think anyone is arguing that any account MUST take advantage of hard shutdowns. Only that it should be an option for those who truly do want it. > How does AWS decide what to shutdown and what to delete? That's a much more interesting question. It tends to be services, rather than storage, that are the root cause of these outlandishly large surprise bills. But if, by chance, it's S3 that's running up the bill, what would a hard shutdown mean? Which data does Amazon delete first to get the account down to its hard limit?
• tr1ll10nb1ll 5y ago
  The exact thing happened to me one year ago, I was 17 and using my dad's credit card to test out Lambda and SageMaker, I had assured him it won't cost anything since I'd be using the free tier. However, my application instance somehow kept running ( was a total noob to AWS ) and I got charged over $300 the next month when I got a monthly report in an email. I panicked and literally just deleted my account. Yes, I just nuked my account like the article mentions. AWS never reached out after that.
  • boruto 5y ago
    Hey I did the same when I first used it. Raked up 9000 Rupees. Cancelled the card and called them, customer care said no worries and the bill was gone.
• INTPenis 5y ago
  I use aws relatively often but for fairly small scale stuff, selfhosting/homelab. I'm very scared of all these horror stories. I've set a budget and an alert for the budget. Is that enough? I can see the budget being overdrawn for the time it takes me to react to the alert but I see no way to actually shut down servies. It would probably be possible to script by monitoring the API and then issuing aws commands to shut things down. But it would be a huge project, someone should get on that.
• deleted 5y ago
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• readonthegoapp 5y ago
  I think it's best to just refer to it in a way that makes sense Not-actually-Free Tier And/Or Not-actually-a-Tier Tier But it's not broken Because that would imply it's not working the way Amazon wants And Amazon is not stupid
• varispeed 5y ago
  Spending limits should be a legal requirement and if company cannot or doesn't want to implement it, then they shouldn't be in business. Simple as that.
• offtop5 5y ago
  Ya know at 20 theirs's a ton of very bad mistakes one can make. Something that can be resolved via getting in contact with AWS isn't one of them. I've gotten charges refunded before.
• ______- 5y ago
  Does anyone else use the AWS free tier for a year, and then when the free year ends, signup for a new account and start another free tier account? It's a good technique if you live frugally. The only caveat being you have to migrate everything to new servers, which can get messy if you don't practice how to do that efficiently.
• StreamBright 5y ago
  >> After all, the AWS Free Tier has been broken for 10+ years. How urgent of a problem can it be? What? I use AWS Free Tier a lot and it is the best thing for small businesses and startups.
• stadium 5y ago
  The AWS billing dashboard has a "budgets" feature. I just added a daily account-level budget of $1 to my dev sandbox account, and setup an alert at 50% of the budget or $0.50. It took about a minute to setup. You can choose to include or exclude refunds and credits. If you exclude them, I am guessing but it should show your true cost without the free tier pricing. If they are included it would tell you the impact right after any free tier offers expired. Perhaps setting a budget like this should be part of any organization's new account setup process.
• sireat 5y ago
  I refuse to let my students touch AWS directly exactly because of this infinite billing problem. My current workaround is finding some SaaS provider that is willing to take the risk on free accounts and act as a middleman. Currently using aiven.io - downside: this covers only a small subset of services that aws offers.
• vvram 5y ago
  For accounts you want to put spend limits on always use a pre-paid card or card with spend limits https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/.
  • U8dcN7vx 5y ago
    Privacy.com doesn't believe anyone would want their service if they have a land-line, and not a mobile. "Give us your phone number", okay, "we sent a confirmation SMS" ... hahahahaha. Yes you can probably dodge that by going with a SMS enabled VoIP provider.