12 ms·

AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

153 points by msmithstubbs 5y ago

villgax 5y ago
What I want is to assign pre-paid limits or just plain limits for a given resource group
porker 5y ago
Gotta fund the next space trip somehow. /s
academia_hack 5y ago
I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.
- WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
  If this is an issue, use Lightsail or a tier 2 provider (like DigitalOcean)
  - notwedtm 5y ago
    That doesn't solve for the AWS only resources.
    - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
      Yeah, no fixing that. Billing can be 24 hours delayed.
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    Then you aren't learning AWS, which was the stated goal.
- thorin 5y ago
  I think the same, it's put me off using anything but the free tier for learning. Azure was slightly better but still not ideal.
- ramshanker 5y ago
  If not possible to cap price, starting with the capacity limiter on S3 and bandwidth limit at VPC level would do. The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    That threat even has its own name now: a denial-of-wallet attack. The limited protections available against this threat from the big cloud providers have to be seen as a warning sign. It's only a matter of time before any small business using these services for hosting can be subject to sudden shakedowns by criminals. "Nice business-critical infrastructure you have there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it." Some of the providers do offer a DoS mitigation service, but the cost for the higher levels can start to look like a shakedown itself.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    > The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary. Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable? The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to cover your typical load + a safety margin at a flat rate per month, and worst case scenario if the attack is big enough you merely get downtime (allowing you to re-evaluate the situation and decide whether to throw more bandwidth at the problem or purchase attack mitigation services) instead of an infinite bill? My current ISP gives me 1Gbps unmetered. Worst case scenario the connection is saturated but at no point the ISP will come to me and ask for extra money.
    - Silhouette 5y ago
      You could still run many systems just fine on private infrastructure with at most a business-class Internet connection to your office or a colo bill for putting your servers somewhere more central. This didn't magically stop working just because someone got paid a lot of money to do PR for cloud services. By the time you take into account the financial costs and inherent risks of cloud hosting, maybe more things should still run that way than actually do. The practical problem today is that cloud now has so much mindshare, justified or otherwise, that the ecosystem around private hosting is diminished. Finding good people with the required admin skills, good sources of equipment, even good software to run local versions of automation we take for granted in the cloud, can be harder than it used to be. I won't be surprised if in a few years some huge tech firm we all thought had faded into obscurity enjoys a new lease of life by offering a set of locally hosted equivalents to popular cloud services that are also easy to administer and scale but come with a lot more predictability because they run on the customer's own infrastructure.
- ctvo 5y ago
  Just use the free tier? You’re notified when you’re approaching the free limit. AWS, anecdotally, has removed 5k++ mistakes I’ve made with little question. (One example they forgave due to my carelessness: ECS and Fargate service with logging to CloudWatch but with verbose logging on. The bill was 8k that month for just CloudWatch usage)
  - jjoonathan 5y ago
    I have only asked for one refund, which was clearly the result of a bug on Amazon's part, and they haggled the whole way. They were quick to a 50% refund and slow to a 100% refund.
    - dexterdog 5y ago
      I've never had a refund denied. One was for 20k on an account that only billed that much monthly. If it's an honest mistake they'll wipe it if you have any history with them.
      - nucleardog 5y ago
        I've had $30k, and later $120k refunded on an account that billed ~$20-25k monthly. Both covered 100% of the overage. AWS is the one major tech company where I've never had any issue getting in touch with a real human who has been empowered to actually fix my issues. The only thing that's been required from us was to show them we were taking reasonable steps to prevent it happening again.
  - onion2k 5y ago
    It's great that they forgave you. I know a startup that incurred a $30k bill that they didn't forgive. The startup folded. AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. It puts a lot of people off.
    - ctvo 5y ago
      I'm sorry, what? > AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. Assume you're paying for your own mistakes, and be thankful when you don't have to? That's a pretty easy policy.
- itsibitzi 5y ago
  I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.
  - adriancr 5y ago
    You will still owe the incurred charges and AWS can send it to collections.
    - ValentineC 5y ago
      AWS is oddly dysfunctional recently. They nerfed the $100 of AWS credits for Alexa developers with zero notice this month, which caused me to incur overages this and last month. I've gotten last month's bill waived, but still received a passive-aggressive email with bad English by a Territory Account Sales person from my region about how my account could be suspended, if I didn't reply to the email within the day. I'm not sure I would trust said person to handle my accounts, even if I was on a corporate budget. I'm still in the process of moving most of my workload away from AWS.
    - donmcronald 5y ago
      I do this. I’d much rather have AWS needing to call me to negotiate / collect than having $15k go through my CC as a legit authorized charge.
      - cube00 5y ago
        Unless they call you, refuse to negotiate and still send it to collections as it is (at least in their mind) a legitimate charge. All these stories of providers giving "good will" credit for these massive charges really concerns me when you look at how other parts of these companies ignore their customers or only reply with scripted responses.
  - randompwd 5y ago
    That doesn't make much sense. You would still be on the hook for the eventual bill. This sounds like a showerthought hashtag lifehack.
- akh 5y ago
  > I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we can do this for people who don't use infra-as-code in https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 but it's not clear what the workflow could look like for them. Perhaps having separate AWS accounts with a budget alert that emails you to run https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke is a work-around just now. (I'm co-founder of Infracost)
  - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
    I think most of the cost for medium-large sized business are elastic(number of pods, bandwidth cost depends on requests per second, storage cost for many things increases linearly with users etc).
    - akh 5y ago
      Yep - it seems to depend on the architecture too (e.g. companies that lift-and-shift to the cloud use VMs heavily). We're discussing ideas on https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730, e.g. could CloudWatch be used to fetch the usage so user has context of what those elastic services used last week/month.
      - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
        Didn't imagined that this functionality would be present. Looks very useful and I would try it out for my terraform setup!
  - koolba 5y ago
    > Perhaps having separate AWS accounts ... You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account. This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined with per-account budget alerts it’s a win across the board.
- ZeroCool2u 5y ago
  I think GCP's official method for doing this is pretty similar to what you describe. You basically create a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit. It's not perfect, because there's a tiny bit of lag between usage and billing calculation, but you'll only end up with a few dollars over the limit instead of thousands. Truly the nuclear option though.
  - outloudvi 5y ago
    Oh, on the GCP story I was always reminded of this: https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/
    - ZeroCool2u 5y ago
      Wow, well they had some pretty fundamental design problems that the author points out. Infinite recursion due to back linking is a pretty easy way to max out your bill. I'm glad that Google forgave the bill at least.
  - Terretta 5y ago
    > GCP's official method for doing this is … a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit I’d love it if GCP’s official method were to disable billing if your bill went over a limit. Sadly, I suspect it would just disable systems instead.
    - nucleardog 5y ago
      How does "disabling billing" but not "disabling systems" work? Is this like asking the phone company "When I reach my plan limits, stop charging me money but let me keep making calls?"
      - Terretta 5y ago
        That was my point. I think GP was incorrect in the mechanism there. I quoted GP verbatim, they said disable billing rather than disable service or delivery or system.
- weinzierl 5y ago
  Oh yes, please. And to all the other commenters that suggest workarounds: Yes, better than nothing, but not exactly a solution to get beginners on board. AWS is complicated enough even without all the billing headaches.
- varelse 5y ago
  Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.
  - danpalmer 5y ago
    This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it which makes the cap fairly useless. Some of these services are billed by such small increments I can't even imagine how complex billing for them is in practice. I'd be surprised if bills are eventually consistent within 24 hours. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement like billing being guaranteed after 1 hour at some point in the not too distant future, but I'd be surprised if we see realtime caps.
    - ValentineC 5y ago
      Oddly enough, Budgets seem to work, since I've gotten alerted to runaway services fast enough (I set it at 80% of my previously-free monthly AWS credits) to be able to log in and fix them, or shut them down.
    - varelse 5y ago
      When I fill my tank with gas, there's a preauthorization with my credit card before I'm allowed to pump a single drop. It seems like a similar arrangement could be made here w/r to hourly level billing. And it would be a huge improvement over the current situation which scares me away.
    - Hokusai 5y ago
      > This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. Or maybe it is a costly implementation that would not bring any profits. The strange thing is that the lack of this feature seems too incur a cost as it causes more calls to customer support. So, maybe it's that implement this feature will reduce profit more that it will reduce cost.
- roystonvassey 5y ago
  That fear of a huge bill is real and much more common than you think.
  - dimitrios1 5y ago
    It's a rational fear as well. It happens more often than one would think.
- mediamachiner 5y ago
  This terrifying scenario is kinda common. We've come across a bunch of tweets like: https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 This inspired us to add billing limits to our SaaS product so that users don't have be in scary situations with bill run offs: https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-billing-limits/ https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-bil...
- dom96 5y ago
  This is the reason I have always stayed away from AWS and stuck to Digital Ocean/Linode. I'm sure I'm not the only one. But I am always surprised to see people complaining about this and still using AWS.
- Saris 5y ago
  Yeah it has firmly kept me away from AWS, Google cloud, and similar. I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    > I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost. To be fair, AWS Lightsail should be an option too. Lightsail machines come with a fairly competitive amount of bandwidth.
  - budhajeewa 5y ago
    Absolutely this! The uncertainty freaks me out. I don't have money to pay thousands of dollars as a result of some bug or attack. I'm in love with DigitalOcean because you know the price you'd pay each month. If it's just 5 USD or 5000 USD, it's what you expected, nothing more. I believe the rest of the clan (Linode, Vultr, etc.) give you the same certainty.
  - Rd6n6 5y ago
    Can you not get charged for bandwidth overages? What happens if you use 3x your transfer limit?
    - Saris 5y ago
      My VPS shuts down and I get an email at 95% usage I think, I can turn it back on if needed and pay for more bandwidth.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  I think confusion around billing has to be intentional at this point. I would guess they are making >$1b every year due to users not understanding the consequences of their actions fully.
- kelp 5y ago
  Unfortunately it's also not just resources that cost money. A couple of fun billing surprises I've seen. 1. A bug in a system that uploaded quite a lot of data to Amazon S3 caused it to hit the S3 API to the tune of about $10K/day. Because AWS billing is usually 2-3 days lagged, it took us 3 days to notice. We fixed it right away once we found it. Goodby to that $30K. 2. An engineer did an Athena query that happened to walk many TB of data. And they unknowingly did it in us-west-2, but the data was in us-east-1. So that resulted in a cross region transfer to the tune of $10K for that single query.
  - veonik 5y ago
    Did you contact support in either event? Just curious if they were at all willing to adjust your bill.
- ryan29 5y ago
  > I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. That's exactly how it should work. It would even be useful if I could designate my development / testing account as unimportant by default so everything can be nuked to limit spending. I think it's the kind of thing that will only be solved by regulation. The government needs to institute the concept of capped overages for cloud providers where if I set my budget to $100 / month they aren't allowed to send me a 100x bill for $10k. Here's the 9 year old request for the same thing on Azure. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/suggestions/3238796-spending-limit-or-maximum-cost-cap-for-azure https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/... I politely asked @AzureSupport (on Twitter) if they could have someone provide an update, but they didn't deliver on their promise to follow up :-(
- michrassena 5y ago
  This is probably what I find most frustrating about the way things are done now. I'd really like to get some idea of how these cloud services work. Every time I'm stopped by the concern that I'd rack up a huge bill and have to rely on the goodwill of a large corporation to have the debt forgiven. I understand the role and the necessity for "the cloud", but it's a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. I hate seeing one of the most notable aspects of the microcomputer era go away which the ability of a motivated individual to gain computer skills using an individual's resources.
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    > a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. A publicly accessible mainframe, where anyone anywhere in the world can script the provision of machines and other resources with little more than terminal and a text editor. That would have been utopian science fiction in the heyday of the mainframe.
- gchamonlive 5y ago
  This is not to be dismissed. AWS billing is too opaque[1] and a misconfigured or buggy plugin can very well trigger resources infinitely[2] to a big nasty surprise. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 [2] https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invalidations/#post-10478298 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invali...
luxpsycho 5y ago
What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...
- cameroncf 5y ago
  This is for when the departmental budget has a little cash left at the end of the fiscal year and they need to spend it.
- koolba 5y ago
  For companies operating on a cash basis with a standard Jan-Dec fiscal calendar (e.g. most small businesses), this would allow you to deduct future spending by prepurchasing AWS credits. It locks away whatever money you dedicate to it but that’d be peanuts compared to paying income tax on it in order to carry it forward as retained earnings.
  - gowld 5y ago
    Why not use a dedicated escrow service for that, which wouold work with all expenses, not just AWS?
    - koolba 5y ago
      If it smells like a checking account then it’s going to be treated as a checking account.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I don't think that works the way you suggest, but I also admit the guidance is unclear. Reg. Section 1.461-1(a)(1) provides the following: If an expenditure results in the creation of an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of the taxable year, such an expenditure may not be deductible, or may be deductible only in part, for the taxable year in which made. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.461-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.461-1 If you buy 10+ months of AWS credits in December and have a Jan-Dec fiscal year, I'd argue that you bought "an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of your taxable year"
joelbondurant 5y ago
The AWS unexpected bills service has competition.
ksec 5y ago
Is this for Tax benefits? Where you could put in all your annual net profits for AWS credit?
- ic4l 5y ago
  You also can use this to meet credit card minimum spending for credit card bonuses.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    I thought of this too, but it looks like they only allow transfers from US bank accounts for prepayment.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  Not sure about those but it'll be incredibly useful for research grant funding monies. Most research grants are "use it or lose it" so if you have any essential infrastructure, capital with short shelf lives/frequent replacement needs, etc. you want/need after the end of the grant, you pay for it in advance. A group I worked with bought about 5 years worth of a specific consumable they needed to continue working, 2-3 year service contract with a vendor to maintain aspects of things so some work could continue and be leveraged for future grants, and hosting/software licenses were often purchased for long time horizons in advance, where possible. With use it or lose it money, you use it. Whether money should be provisioned that way and coming in under budget should be punished is another story...
  - ksec 5y ago
    Oh this is a nice way to lock in all the money from Research Grants. I remember reading on Twitter about some of the research requiring massive amount of compute resources. ( Like a whole region of AWS ). This AWS money pool usage makes sense in that context.
- smachiz 5y ago
  No, GAAP solves for this.
simonw 5y ago
Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.
- bethecloud 5y ago
  You can do this today with the decentralized cloud: https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/host-a-static-website/host-a-static-website-with-the-cli-and-linksharing-service https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/host-a-static-website/host...
  - jagger27 5y ago
    Of course it has its own cryptocurrency.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    what are the odds that that service exists in 5 years? Or 10 years? I'm confident AWS will.
- sudhirj 5y ago
  I think you could, yes. It’s a different question as to how fast you’d hit the limit, but definitely possible to do a “this site can only have 100000 visits” type art project.
- akh 5y ago
  I've also been thinking about that! I wonder if https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/ is an alternative though, as in could I pay them so they could mirror it for a 100 years?
  - simonw 5y ago
    I would absolutely love to be able to donate a domain name to the Internet Archive plus a lump sum cash donation and have them keep it hosted in perpetuity.
bethecloud 5y ago
STORJ DCS (Decentralized Cloud Storage) has enabled users to pay in advance with crypto since day 1.
- svnpenn 5y ago
  That site is weird. I get a "not found", then two seconds later the page loads. If that's my first interaction with the domain, I'm definitely not giving them money.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  They haven’t even had a working service since day 1 (still don’t?…)? I consulted for a couple of blockchains startups a few years ago, and this was the biggest piece of perpetual vaporware I came across. Good for them if they’ve finally managed to have a working product, but I wouldn’t be relying on it to work for a week, let alone some actually long period of time.
vagrantJin 5y ago
Nope. Used AWS for 3 years at a decent sized agency. It seems we underestimated how much not to forget checking and scrutinize every line item in the bill because our lighsail instances had another DB attached to it that we had no idea about, but was charging a crazy fee (converting our local currency to dollars = 19x) There was much finger-pointing.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  But unless you plan to block your card and ignore AWS' email(might not be a healthy thing for business), how will prepaying bad?
Havoc 5y ago
Not much of a feature. If that could be used as a hard limit that would be more interesting
benjaminwootton 5y ago
AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach. I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding. Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it tidied up whilst I’m incurring significant costs. The whole billing stuff is complex and opaque and there aren’t enough controls and limits on spend. I feel like I need to dedicate 1 x FTE at least on AWS cost control which is a high cost for a small business. As a CTO, I’ve previously influenced $millions in spend on AWS, but would be very nervous putting my reputation on the line to spend big with them in future. I’m frankly losing trust in their commercial approach.
- Terretta 5y ago
  Anecdata, but my experience as CTO of a startup, a hedge fund, and a bank has been the opposite. I’ve never had an unexpected cost they didn’t readily credit back, provided we were taking the recommended and reasonably easy steps to keep on top of costs and limits.
  - cube00 5y ago
    The problem is relying on this "good will" and "one time only" to credit back compared with having a way to set hard billing limits so you don't need to have this conversation as a part of your business as usual. Mistakes will always happen with something as complex as this and that's what billing and rate limits are supposed to protect your against.
  - qaq 5y ago
    Whats your monthly spend? I used to work for an org with 50K monthly spend none cared at AWS about us. Now I work for a big org with very serious spend and it's night and day we can get access to eng. quickly we have regular meetings with PMs and get our requests for AWS features put onto roadmap etc.
    - 5y ago
simonebrunozzi 5y ago
Cheaper to park your money to AWS, rather than pay negative interests on your bank account.
- cube00 5y ago
  I can't wait until I can trade my credit with other AWS users.
sudhirj 5y ago
No mention of discounts, so this is probably a purely cashflow / tax management system.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Discount?
zodiakzz 5y ago
I wish Digital Ocean would allow this. My country's debit/credit cards don't work online reliably, my attached cards can start getting rejected randomly any time. I'm always nervous about getting my account suspended due to missed payments, DO is pretty forgiving thankfully.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Linode allows you to pre-fund your account.
- prionassembly 5y ago
  They do with PayPal at least. Their emails even use language like "you need to top up your account".
- freedomben 5y ago
  Interesting, I had the opposite experience. The cardholder forgot what Digital Ocean was and placed a chargeback. Do immediately locked my account which had been in good standing for years. I couldn't log in the console or API to do anything. I wrote about it here if you're interested to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806086 Linode is very similar pricing/offering and has incredible customer service. I'm very happy with them.
StratusBen 5y ago
I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. As others in the thread have mentioned, the core problem of tracking your AWS costs and where they're coming from is still a very hard problem for most organizations. Especially startups. I'm a co-founder of https://www.vantage.sh/ https://www.vantage.sh/ which helps organizations track their AWS costs and we'll look at incorporating Advance Pay balances into the platform.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  >I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. I'm not surprised. I'm convinced AWS has strategically focused on making costs difficult to keep on top of so you just pick a service, assume it's magically cost optimized for you and use it even though that's not reality. Side note, I love the Vantage EC2 instance comparison chart, I've used it a few times recently and it made my life so much easier. Thank you and your team(s) for providing this freely and publicly: https://instances.vantage.sh/ https://instances.vantage.sh/
underseacables 5y ago
I use Glacier For cold storage of family videos and photos. I have pre-paid for the next 10 years of expected usage. I just wanted to be sure that we would never lose that data, so I think advanced billing is great.
prepend 5y ago
This is really nice. Now just add that when the amount is met, everything stops. Or maybe dropped into glacier to accrue charges. I’d like this to work like a prepaid phone.
dekhn 5y ago
Wasn't this already a negotiable option?
devops000 5y ago
I was thinking about switching from Digital Ocean+Cloud66 to AWS but all comments about invoices and saas helping forecast aws invoice they convinced me to stay with Digital Ocean
literallyaduck 5y ago
ELI5 does this mean I can prepay and not be at risk for more than I have prepaid?
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
  No. It just means that you can give money to AWS without having a bill, you are still responsible for the charges incurred regardless of how much you paid in advance.
mdoms 5y ago
Awesome can't wait to give one of the richest companies on the planet an interest free loan.
daitangio 5y ago
Sorry but I did not understand the ‘cool’ part. With Linode & Webfaction I was able to prepay via credit card too. What is the advantage? To get block me if the credit is too low for s specific service?
- alexjplant 5y ago
  Believe it or not a big part of cloud migration is figuring out how to cost it and get the finance people on board with after-the-fact operational expenses (*aaS) replacing capital/labor expenses (servers, sysadmins, network engineers, etc). When I worked in defense contracting I sat through half a dozen meetings with cloud vendors and virtually all of them took the time to explain how the costing model was distinct from on-prem, how to estimate and budget, governance, etc. At the end of the day many orgs with deep pockets also have very entrenched financial processes. AWS is doing everything that it can to make a play for these dollars by creating on-ramps such as this one.
axpy906 5y ago
Why are the top comments companies promoting their solution? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s find to do so I just don’t expect them at the top.
- xeromal 5y ago
  I don't see any top 1st level comments promoting anything. The only promotions I see are comments to the top comments which is hard to avoid!
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Demand for a solution is probably quite high.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  This has been increasingly prevalent on HN, and I'd (eventually) like to see something done about it. Sure, Hacker News is a project incubator at heart, so it will naturally have a higher ratio of CEOs:normal_users. That doesn't excuse how obnoxious it is seeing someone plug their SAAS-of-the-day on seemingly innocuous information (like how Fig hitched a ride on a Brew PSA). It's frustrating me to the point where I might just leave this site. I'm sick and tired of this new-wave guerilla marketing.
ramoz 5y ago
Fwiw - GCP already does this through "Enterprise Agreements" This is largely desired by customers with complicated acquisitions and budget allocation periods (Government)
3pt14159 5y ago
Even though I'm no where close to the world's best AWS developer, I happened onto a contract for a major stock exchange and ended up writing code that truly commands fleets of computers. What I learned: There are plenty of ways to optimize your AWS spend. Hire consultants, especially ones that do so on commission. There are so many tricks that work 99% of the time and will save you a ton. For example, read-before-update on DynamoDB. Puts are expensive, reads are cheap. Depending on your data you may be able to do the diff in code and only push the delta. There are many other optimizations. If you're a growing business it helps to get help with this stuff. I never would have guessed were it not for the pros that worked for my client.
- jimsimmons 5y ago
  I’m curious about infra of stock exchanges these days. Any resources you could point to? I’m especially curious how they handle sudden volatility and spike in trading. We usually talk about high frequency testing but very less about the infra that consumes all of those trades
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    I'm under a couple strict NDAs, unfortunately, and I didn't work on the trading engine, just software around piping giant amounts of data around to a ton of consumers. But the stuff I worked on heavily utilized AWS wherever possible and the emphasis was on prioritization. No matter what it did to the code, if high priority data came in the swarm of computers had to switch to it as soon as possible.
baby 5y ago
How is what AWS doing legal btw? How can they charge people without limits? Isn’t this abusive?
- bdibs 5y ago
  How is that abusive? You pay for what you use and that’s it.
  - baby 5y ago
    If you make a mistake you can be down one million dollar when you wake up
dabinat 5y ago
AWS’s on demand pricing is high but their reserved pricing doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility. Why is it just 1 or 3 years? What if I only need it for 6 months or 2 years? Can’t I just get a discount proportional to a custom length of time? Why can’t I choose the amount of money I want to pay under the “partial upfront” option? Why can I only reserve some AWS services and not others? Why can’t I reserve a certain amount of S3 storage for example?

153 points by msmithstubbs 5y ago

villgax 5y ago

What I want is to assign pre-paid limits or just plain limits for a given resource group

porker 5y ago

Gotta fund the next space trip somehow. /s

academia_hack 5y ago

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
If this is an issue, use Lightsail or a tier 2 provider (like DigitalOcean)
- notwedtm 5y ago
  That doesn't solve for the AWS only resources.
  - WrtCdEvrydy 5y ago
    Yeah, no fixing that. Billing can be 24 hours delayed.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  Then you aren't learning AWS, which was the stated goal.
thorin 5y ago
I think the same, it's put me off using anything but the free tier for learning. Azure was slightly better but still not ideal.
ramshanker 5y ago
If not possible to cap price, starting with the capacity limiter on S3 and bandwidth limit at VPC level would do. The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary.
- Silhouette 5y ago
  That threat even has its own name now: a denial-of-wallet attack. The limited protections available against this threat from the big cloud providers have to be seen as a warning sign. It's only a matter of time before any small business using these services for hosting can be subject to sudden shakedowns by criminals. "Nice business-critical infrastructure you have there, be a shame if anything were to happen to it." Some of the providers do offer a DoS mitigation service, but the cost for the higher levels can start to look like a shakedown itself.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > The possibility that someone flood the server even for static resources causing bandwidth spiked Bill is scary. Genuinely curious, is this just a side-effect of the cloud craze or did DDoS attacks become so powerful that old-school approaches of appropriately-sized bare-metal infrastructure with finite but unmetered bandwidth are no longer viable? The way I see it, you can provision enough unmetered bandwidth to cover your typical load + a safety margin at a flat rate per month, and worst case scenario if the attack is big enough you merely get downtime (allowing you to re-evaluate the situation and decide whether to throw more bandwidth at the problem or purchase attack mitigation services) instead of an infinite bill? My current ISP gives me 1Gbps unmetered. Worst case scenario the connection is saturated but at no point the ISP will come to me and ask for extra money.
  - Silhouette 5y ago
    You could still run many systems just fine on private infrastructure with at most a business-class Internet connection to your office or a colo bill for putting your servers somewhere more central. This didn't magically stop working just because someone got paid a lot of money to do PR for cloud services. By the time you take into account the financial costs and inherent risks of cloud hosting, maybe more things should still run that way than actually do. The practical problem today is that cloud now has so much mindshare, justified or otherwise, that the ecosystem around private hosting is diminished. Finding good people with the required admin skills, good sources of equipment, even good software to run local versions of automation we take for granted in the cloud, can be harder than it used to be. I won't be surprised if in a few years some huge tech firm we all thought had faded into obscurity enjoys a new lease of life by offering a set of locally hosted equivalents to popular cloud services that are also easy to administer and scale but come with a lot more predictability because they run on the customer's own infrastructure.
ctvo 5y ago
Just use the free tier? You’re notified when you’re approaching the free limit. AWS, anecdotally, has removed 5k++ mistakes I’ve made with little question. (One example they forgave due to my carelessness: ECS and Fargate service with logging to CloudWatch but with verbose logging on. The bill was 8k that month for just CloudWatch usage)
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  I have only asked for one refund, which was clearly the result of a bug on Amazon's part, and they haggled the whole way. They were quick to a 50% refund and slow to a 100% refund.
  - dexterdog 5y ago
    I've never had a refund denied. One was for 20k on an account that only billed that much monthly. If it's an honest mistake they'll wipe it if you have any history with them.
    - nucleardog 5y ago
      I've had $30k, and later $120k refunded on an account that billed ~$20-25k monthly. Both covered 100% of the overage. AWS is the one major tech company where I've never had any issue getting in touch with a real human who has been empowered to actually fix my issues. The only thing that's been required from us was to show them we were taking reasonable steps to prevent it happening again.
- onion2k 5y ago
  It's great that they forgave you. I know a startup that incurred a $30k bill that they didn't forgive. The startup folded. AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. It puts a lot of people off.
  - ctvo 5y ago
    I'm sorry, what? > AWS's unknowable policy for the cost of errors represents a huge risk for individuals and small businesses. Assume you're paying for your own mistakes, and be thankful when you don't have to? That's a pretty easy policy.
itsibitzi 5y ago
I've read that some people use a pre-paid credit card with a $1 spending limit when setting up their playground accounts. Seems like a reasonable approach.
- adriancr 5y ago
  You will still owe the incurred charges and AWS can send it to collections.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    AWS is oddly dysfunctional recently. They nerfed the $100 of AWS credits for Alexa developers with zero notice this month, which caused me to incur overages this and last month. I've gotten last month's bill waived, but still received a passive-aggressive email with bad English by a Territory Account Sales person from my region about how my account could be suspended, if I didn't reply to the email within the day. I'm not sure I would trust said person to handle my accounts, even if I was on a corporate budget. I'm still in the process of moving most of my workload away from AWS.
  - donmcronald 5y ago
    I do this. I’d much rather have AWS needing to call me to negotiate / collect than having $15k go through my CC as a legit authorized charge.
    - cube00 5y ago
      Unless they call you, refuse to negotiate and still send it to collections as it is (at least in their mind) a legitimate charge. All these stories of providers giving "good will" credit for these massive charges really concerns me when you look at how other parts of these companies ignore their customers or only reply with scripted responses.
- randompwd 5y ago
  That doesn't make much sense. You would still be on the hook for the eventual bill. This sounds like a showerthought hashtag lifehack.
akh 5y ago
> I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we can do this for people who don't use infra-as-code in https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/840 but it's not clear what the workflow could look like for them. Perhaps having separate AWS accounts with a budget alert that emails you to run https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke https://github.com/rebuy-de/aws-nuke is a work-around just now. (I'm co-founder of Infracost)
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  I think most of the cost for medium-large sized business are elastic(number of pods, bandwidth cost depends on requests per second, storage cost for many things increases linearly with users etc).
  - akh 5y ago
    Yep - it seems to depend on the architecture too (e.g. companies that lift-and-shift to the cloud use VMs heavily). We're discussing ideas on https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730 https://github.com/infracost/infracost/issues/730, e.g. could CloudWatch be used to fetch the usage so user has context of what those elastic services used last week/month.
    - YetAnotherNick 5y ago
      Didn't imagined that this functionality would be present. Looks very useful and I would try it out for my terraform setup!
- koolba 5y ago
  > Perhaps having separate AWS accounts ... You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account. This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined with per-account budget alerts it’s a win across the board.
ZeroCool2u 5y ago
I think GCP's official method for doing this is pretty similar to what you describe. You basically create a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit. It's not perfect, because there's a tiny bit of lag between usage and billing calculation, but you'll only end up with a few dollars over the limit instead of thousands. Truly the nuclear option though.
- outloudvi 5y ago
  Oh, on the GCP story I was always reminded of this: https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/ https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/
  - ZeroCool2u 5y ago
    Wow, well they had some pretty fundamental design problems that the author points out. Infinite recursion due to back linking is a pretty easy way to max out your bill. I'm glad that Google forgave the bill at least.
- Terretta 5y ago
  > GCP's official method for doing this is … a cloud function that disables billing if your bill goes over a configured limit I’d love it if GCP’s official method were to disable billing if your bill went over a limit. Sadly, I suspect it would just disable systems instead.
  - nucleardog 5y ago
    How does "disabling billing" but not "disabling systems" work? Is this like asking the phone company "When I reach my plan limits, stop charging me money but let me keep making calls?"
    - Terretta 5y ago
      That was my point. I think GP was incorrect in the mechanism there. I quoted GP verbatim, they said disable billing rather than disable service or delivery or system.
weinzierl 5y ago
Oh yes, please. And to all the other commenters that suggest workarounds: Yes, better than nothing, but not exactly a solution to get beginners on board. AWS is complicated enough even without all the billing headaches.
varelse 5y ago
Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.
- danpalmer 5y ago
  This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. My guess is that billing lags enough that they can't stick to a price cap, which means that they either have to guarantee the price cap and swallow the difference, which could be exploited by malicious users to get free compute, or they have to say that there's a delay on it which makes the cap fairly useless. Some of these services are billed by such small increments I can't even imagine how complex billing for them is in practice. I'd be surprised if bills are eventually consistent within 24 hours. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an announcement like billing being guaranteed after 1 hour at some point in the not too distant future, but I'd be surprised if we see realtime caps.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    Oddly enough, Budgets seem to work, since I've gotten alerted to runaway services fast enough (I set it at 80% of my previously-free monthly AWS credits) to be able to log in and fix them, or shut them down.
  - varelse 5y ago
    When I fill my tank with gas, there's a preauthorization with my credit card before I'm allowed to pump a single drop. It seems like a similar arrangement could be made here w/r to hourly level billing. And it would be a huge improvement over the current situation which scares me away.
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    > This is something that everyone seems to ask for (I know I'd love it), but they haven't implemented it. To me that suggests that they _can't_. Or maybe it is a costly implementation that would not bring any profits. The strange thing is that the lack of this feature seems too incur a cost as it causes more calls to customer support. So, maybe it's that implement this feature will reduce profit more that it will reduce cost.
roystonvassey 5y ago
That fear of a huge bill is real and much more common than you think.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  It's a rational fear as well. It happens more often than one would think.
mediamachiner 5y ago
This terrifying scenario is kinda common. We've come across a bunch of tweets like: https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 https://twitter.com/alexwlchan/status/1399095011178958851 This inspired us to add billing limits to our SaaS product so that users don't have be in scary situations with bill run offs: https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-billing-limits/ https://mediamachine.io/blog/protect-your-customers-with-bil...
dom96 5y ago
This is the reason I have always stayed away from AWS and stuck to Digital Ocean/Linode. I'm sure I'm not the only one. But I am always surprised to see people complaining about this and still using AWS.
Saris 5y ago
Yeah it has firmly kept me away from AWS, Google cloud, and similar. I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost.
- ValentineC 5y ago
  > I use Vultr or Digitalocean if I need a server somewhere because at least it's just a pre-set cost. To be fair, AWS Lightsail should be an option too. Lightsail machines come with a fairly competitive amount of bandwidth.
- budhajeewa 5y ago
  Absolutely this! The uncertainty freaks me out. I don't have money to pay thousands of dollars as a result of some bug or attack. I'm in love with DigitalOcean because you know the price you'd pay each month. If it's just 5 USD or 5000 USD, it's what you expected, nothing more. I believe the rest of the clan (Linode, Vultr, etc.) give you the same certainty.
- Rd6n6 5y ago
  Can you not get charged for bandwidth overages? What happens if you use 3x your transfer limit?
  - Saris 5y ago
    My VPS shuts down and I get an email at 95% usage I think, I can turn it back on if needed and pay for more bandwidth.
bostonsre 5y ago
I think confusion around billing has to be intentional at this point. I would guess they are making >$1b every year due to users not understanding the consequences of their actions fully.
kelp 5y ago
Unfortunately it's also not just resources that cost money. A couple of fun billing surprises I've seen. 1. A bug in a system that uploaded quite a lot of data to Amazon S3 caused it to hit the S3 API to the tune of about $10K/day. Because AWS billing is usually 2-3 days lagged, it took us 3 days to notice. We fixed it right away once we found it. Goodby to that $30K. 2. An engineer did an Athena query that happened to walk many TB of data. And they unknowingly did it in us-west-2, but the data was in us-east-1. So that resulted in a cross region transfer to the tune of $10K for that single query.
- veonik 5y ago
  Did you contact support in either event? Just curious if they were at all willing to adjust your bill.
ryan29 5y ago
> I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. That's exactly how it should work. It would even be useful if I could designate my development / testing account as unimportant by default so everything can be nuked to limit spending. I think it's the kind of thing that will only be solved by regulation. The government needs to institute the concept of capped overages for cloud providers where if I set my budget to $100 / month they aren't allowed to send me a 100x bill for $10k. Here's the 9 year old request for the same thing on Azure. https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/suggestions/3238796-spending-limit-or-maximum-cost-cap-for-azure https://feedback.azure.com/forums/170030-signup-and-billing/... I politely asked @AzureSupport (on Twitter) if they could have someone provide an update, but they didn't deliver on their promise to follow up :-(
michrassena 5y ago
This is probably what I find most frustrating about the way things are done now. I'd really like to get some idea of how these cloud services work. Every time I'm stopped by the concern that I'd rack up a huge bill and have to rely on the goodwill of a large corporation to have the debt forgiven. I understand the role and the necessity for "the cloud", but it's a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. I hate seeing one of the most notable aspects of the microcomputer era go away which the ability of a motivated individual to gain computer skills using an individual's resources.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > a re-invention of the role of the mainframe. A publicly accessible mainframe, where anyone anywhere in the world can script the provision of machines and other resources with little more than terminal and a text editor. That would have been utopian science fiction in the heyday of the mainframe.
gchamonlive 5y ago
This is not to be dismissed. AWS billing is too opaque[1] and a misconfigured or buggy plugin can very well trigger resources infinitely[2] to a big nasty surprise. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21694835 [2] https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invalidations/#post-10478298 https://wordpress.org/support/topic/amazon-cloudfront-invali...

luxpsycho 5y ago

What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...

cameroncf 5y ago
This is for when the departmental budget has a little cash left at the end of the fiscal year and they need to spend it.
koolba 5y ago
For companies operating on a cash basis with a standard Jan-Dec fiscal calendar (e.g. most small businesses), this would allow you to deduct future spending by prepurchasing AWS credits. It locks away whatever money you dedicate to it but that’d be peanuts compared to paying income tax on it in order to carry it forward as retained earnings.
- gowld 5y ago
  Why not use a dedicated escrow service for that, which wouold work with all expenses, not just AWS?
  - koolba 5y ago
    If it smells like a checking account then it’s going to be treated as a checking account.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I don't think that works the way you suggest, but I also admit the guidance is unclear. Reg. Section 1.461-1(a)(1) provides the following: If an expenditure results in the creation of an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of the taxable year, such an expenditure may not be deductible, or may be deductible only in part, for the taxable year in which made. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.461-1 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.461-1 If you buy 10+ months of AWS credits in December and have a Jan-Dec fiscal year, I'd argue that you bought "an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of your taxable year"

joelbondurant 5y ago

The AWS unexpected bills service has competition.

ksec 5y ago

Is this for Tax benefits? Where you could put in all your annual net profits for AWS credit?

ic4l 5y ago
You also can use this to meet credit card minimum spending for credit card bonuses.
- ValentineC 5y ago
  I thought of this too, but it looks like they only allow transfers from US bank accounts for prepayment.
Frost1x 5y ago
Not sure about those but it'll be incredibly useful for research grant funding monies. Most research grants are "use it or lose it" so if you have any essential infrastructure, capital with short shelf lives/frequent replacement needs, etc. you want/need after the end of the grant, you pay for it in advance. A group I worked with bought about 5 years worth of a specific consumable they needed to continue working, 2-3 year service contract with a vendor to maintain aspects of things so some work could continue and be leveraged for future grants, and hosting/software licenses were often purchased for long time horizons in advance, where possible. With use it or lose it money, you use it. Whether money should be provisioned that way and coming in under budget should be punished is another story...
- ksec 5y ago
  Oh this is a nice way to lock in all the money from Research Grants. I remember reading on Twitter about some of the research requiring massive amount of compute resources. ( Like a whole region of AWS ). This AWS money pool usage makes sense in that context.
smachiz 5y ago
No, GAAP solves for this.

simonw 5y ago

Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.

bethecloud 5y ago
You can do this today with the decentralized cloud: https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/host-a-static-website/host-a-static-website-with-the-cli-and-linksharing-service https://docs.storj.io/dcs/how-tos/host-a-static-website/host...
- jagger27 5y ago
  Of course it has its own cryptocurrency.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  what are the odds that that service exists in 5 years? Or 10 years? I'm confident AWS will.
sudhirj 5y ago
I think you could, yes. It’s a different question as to how fast you’d hit the limit, but definitely possible to do a “this site can only have 100000 visits” type art project.
akh 5y ago
I've also been thinking about that! I wonder if https://archive.org/web/ https://archive.org/web/ is an alternative though, as in could I pay them so they could mirror it for a 100 years?
- simonw 5y ago
  I would absolutely love to be able to donate a domain name to the Internet Archive plus a lump sum cash donation and have them keep it hosted in perpetuity.

bethecloud 5y ago

STORJ DCS (Decentralized Cloud Storage) has enabled users to pay in advance with crypto since day 1.

svnpenn 5y ago
That site is weird. I get a "not found", then two seconds later the page loads. If that's my first interaction with the domain, I'm definitely not giving them money.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
They haven’t even had a working service since day 1 (still don’t?…)? I consulted for a couple of blockchains startups a few years ago, and this was the biggest piece of perpetual vaporware I came across. Good for them if they’ve finally managed to have a working product, but I wouldn’t be relying on it to work for a week, let alone some actually long period of time.

vagrantJin 5y ago

Nope. Used AWS for 3 years at a decent sized agency. It seems we underestimated how much not to forget checking and scrutinize every line item in the bill because our lighsail instances had another DB attached to it that we had no idea about, but was charging a crazy fee (converting our local currency to dollars = 19x) There was much finger-pointing.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago
But unless you plan to block your card and ignore AWS' email(might not be a healthy thing for business), how will prepaying bad?

Havoc 5y ago

Not much of a feature. If that could be used as a hard limit that would be more interesting

benjaminwootton 5y ago

AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach. I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding. Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it tidied up whilst I’m incurring significant costs. The whole billing stuff is complex and opaque and there aren’t enough controls and limits on spend. I feel like I need to dedicate 1 x FTE at least on AWS cost control which is a high cost for a small business. As a CTO, I’ve previously influenced $millions in spend on AWS, but would be very nervous putting my reputation on the line to spend big with them in future. I’m frankly losing trust in their commercial approach.

Terretta 5y ago
Anecdata, but my experience as CTO of a startup, a hedge fund, and a bank has been the opposite. I’ve never had an unexpected cost they didn’t readily credit back, provided we were taking the recommended and reasonably easy steps to keep on top of costs and limits.
- cube00 5y ago
  The problem is relying on this "good will" and "one time only" to credit back compared with having a way to set hard billing limits so you don't need to have this conversation as a part of your business as usual. Mistakes will always happen with something as complex as this and that's what billing and rate limits are supposed to protect your against.
- qaq 5y ago
  Whats your monthly spend? I used to work for an org with 50K monthly spend none cared at AWS about us. Now I work for a big org with very serious spend and it's night and day we can get access to eng. quickly we have regular meetings with PMs and get our requests for AWS features put onto roadmap etc.
  - 5y ago

simonebrunozzi 5y ago

Cheaper to park your money to AWS, rather than pay negative interests on your bank account.

cube00 5y ago
I can't wait until I can trade my credit with other AWS users.

sudhirj 5y ago

No mention of discounts, so this is probably a purely cashflow / tax management system.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
Discount?

zodiakzz 5y ago

I wish Digital Ocean would allow this. My country's debit/credit cards don't work online reliably, my attached cards can start getting rejected randomly any time. I'm always nervous about getting my account suspended due to missed payments, DO is pretty forgiving thankfully.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago
Linode allows you to pre-fund your account.
prionassembly 5y ago
They do with PayPal at least. Their emails even use language like "you need to top up your account".
freedomben 5y ago
Interesting, I had the opposite experience. The cardholder forgot what Digital Ocean was and placed a chargeback. Do immediately locked my account which had been in good standing for years. I couldn't log in the console or API to do anything. I wrote about it here if you're interested to learn more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25806086 Linode is very similar pricing/offering and has incredible customer service. I'm very happy with them.

StratusBen 5y ago

I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. As others in the thread have mentioned, the core problem of tracking your AWS costs and where they're coming from is still a very hard problem for most organizations. Especially startups. I'm a co-founder of https://www.vantage.sh/ https://www.vantage.sh/ which helps organizations track their AWS costs and we'll look at incorporating Advance Pay balances into the platform.

Frost1x 5y ago
>I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. I'm not surprised. I'm convinced AWS has strategically focused on making costs difficult to keep on top of so you just pick a service, assume it's magically cost optimized for you and use it even though that's not reality. Side note, I love the Vantage EC2 instance comparison chart, I've used it a few times recently and it made my life so much easier. Thank you and your team(s) for providing this freely and publicly: https://instances.vantage.sh/ https://instances.vantage.sh/

underseacables 5y ago

I use Glacier For cold storage of family videos and photos. I have pre-paid for the next 10 years of expected usage. I just wanted to be sure that we would never lose that data, so I think advanced billing is great.

prepend 5y ago

This is really nice. Now just add that when the amount is met, everything stops. Or maybe dropped into glacier to accrue charges. I’d like this to work like a prepaid phone.

dekhn 5y ago

Wasn't this already a negotiable option?

devops000 5y ago

I was thinking about switching from Digital Ocean+Cloud66 to AWS but all comments about invoices and saas helping forecast aws invoice they convinced me to stay with Digital Ocean

literallyaduck 5y ago

ELI5 does this mean I can prepay and not be at risk for more than I have prepaid?

isbvhodnvemrwvn 5y ago
No. It just means that you can give money to AWS without having a bill, you are still responsible for the charges incurred regardless of how much you paid in advance.

mdoms 5y ago

Awesome can't wait to give one of the richest companies on the planet an interest free loan.

daitangio 5y ago

Sorry but I did not understand the ‘cool’ part. With Linode & Webfaction I was able to prepay via credit card too. What is the advantage? To get block me if the credit is too low for s specific service?

alexjplant 5y ago
Believe it or not a big part of cloud migration is figuring out how to cost it and get the finance people on board with after-the-fact operational expenses (*aaS) replacing capital/labor expenses (servers, sysadmins, network engineers, etc). When I worked in defense contracting I sat through half a dozen meetings with cloud vendors and virtually all of them took the time to explain how the costing model was distinct from on-prem, how to estimate and budget, governance, etc. At the end of the day many orgs with deep pockets also have very entrenched financial processes. AWS is doing everything that it can to make a play for these dollars by creating on-ramps such as this one.

axpy906 5y ago

Why are the top comments companies promoting their solution? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s find to do so I just don’t expect them at the top.

xeromal 5y ago
I don't see any top 1st level comments promoting anything. The only promotions I see are comments to the top comments which is hard to avoid!
MattGaiser 5y ago
Demand for a solution is probably quite high.
smoldesu 5y ago
This has been increasingly prevalent on HN, and I'd (eventually) like to see something done about it. Sure, Hacker News is a project incubator at heart, so it will naturally have a higher ratio of CEOs:normal_users. That doesn't excuse how obnoxious it is seeing someone plug their SAAS-of-the-day on seemingly innocuous information (like how Fig hitched a ride on a Brew PSA). It's frustrating me to the point where I might just leave this site. I'm sick and tired of this new-wave guerilla marketing.

ramoz 5y ago

Fwiw - GCP already does this through "Enterprise Agreements" This is largely desired by customers with complicated acquisitions and budget allocation periods (Government)

3pt14159 5y ago

Even though I'm no where close to the world's best AWS developer, I happened onto a contract for a major stock exchange and ended up writing code that truly commands fleets of computers. What I learned: There are plenty of ways to optimize your AWS spend. Hire consultants, especially ones that do so on commission. There are so many tricks that work 99% of the time and will save you a ton. For example, read-before-update on DynamoDB. Puts are expensive, reads are cheap. Depending on your data you may be able to do the diff in code and only push the delta. There are many other optimizations. If you're a growing business it helps to get help with this stuff. I never would have guessed were it not for the pros that worked for my client.

jimsimmons 5y ago
I’m curious about infra of stock exchanges these days. Any resources you could point to? I’m especially curious how they handle sudden volatility and spike in trading. We usually talk about high frequency testing but very less about the infra that consumes all of those trades
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  I'm under a couple strict NDAs, unfortunately, and I didn't work on the trading engine, just software around piping giant amounts of data around to a ton of consumers. But the stuff I worked on heavily utilized AWS wherever possible and the emphasis was on prioritization. No matter what it did to the code, if high priority data came in the swarm of computers had to switch to it as soon as possible.

baby 5y ago

How is what AWS doing legal btw? How can they charge people without limits? Isn’t this abusive?

bdibs 5y ago
How is that abusive? You pay for what you use and that’s it.
- baby 5y ago
  If you make a mistake you can be down one million dollar when you wake up

dabinat 5y ago

AWS’s on demand pricing is high but their reserved pricing doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility. Why is it just 1 or 3 years? What if I only need it for 6 months or 2 years? Can’t I just get a discount proportional to a custom length of time? Why can’t I choose the amount of money I want to pay under the “partial upfront” option? Why can I only reserve some AWS services and not others? Why can’t I reserve a certain amount of S3 storage for example?