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I once ran up a $15,000 bill on Azure completely by accident when trying to get one of their video processing services to work. Once I figured out the service

I once ran up a $15,000 bill on Azure completely by accident when trying to get one of their video processing services to work. Once I figured out the service wasn't going to do what I wanted at a price I could afford, I tried to detach it and shut it down and thought I had succeeded. I didn't. The offending process costing me money didn't appear on the Azure console and I had no idea it was running, how to access it to stop it or even to know what was going on. When it turned up on my bill I nearly had a heart attack. Thankfully they let me out of it once I pointed out I was getting billed for something I couldn't see. I appreciated that greatly but I've never gone back to Azure and the experience scarred me so much I don't think I ever will. This was about 4 years ago so more than likely they have sorted it out. They keep reminding me I have $50 of test/dev credit on Azure through my Visual Studio subscription but it flat out frightens me to even try to use it. AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.

mrits 5y ago
It took me 2 years to get AWS to stop billing me a few cents a month. I didn't try that hard but every month or so I'd get another bill for like 23 cents. I'd login and try to figure out what was still turned on.
- foolfoolz 5y ago
  i have this happening on gcp and aws. i get a text from my credit card each month for like 10-25 cents. i’ve gone in multiple times all the consoles show $0 it’s impossible to track down. it’s so cheap i haven’t cared enough to dig more
  - bspammer 5y ago
    https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=2021&month=9 https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=202... This page should show you a full breakdown of exactly what’s costing you money across all regions.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    Yep. I have some one cent a month bill from GCP from Hackathon days.
    - citizenpaul 5y ago
      There is a good chance all of you have a reserved IP address floating around somewhere in the settings. It costs like .05 a month
  - dilyevsky 5y ago
    Both services have billing breakdowns by sku. Are you saying it shows nothing?
- Aeolun 5y ago
  I found the solution to that problem. I just actually use AWS for some stuff now, and my bill turned into a nice $20 ish dollars :P
- mey 5y ago
  Have had AWS tell us to chargeback a payment that we couldn't cancel.
- jonas21 5y ago
  AWS has been billing me a few cents per month for over a decade now. Eventually, the credit card I was using expired, and so every month for the past 7 years, they've sent me an email: > Dear Amazon Web Services Customer, > Your AWS Account is about to be suspended. There is still an outstanding payment problem with your account, as our previous communications did not lead to successful payment of your past due AWS charges. > We were unable to charge your credit card for the amount of $0.26 for your use of AWS services during the month of Aug-2021. We will attempt to collect this amount again. Unless we are successful in collecting the balance of $0.26 in full by 09/30/2021, your Amazon Web Services account may be suspended or terminated. The balance never increases, even though it always says the charges are from the previous month. It's as though they forget the balance each month because it's not worth collecting, then my account runs up another small charge, which they promptly forget. And of course they have yet to terminate the account. I would gladly close it myself, but I'm locked out, and it's not really worth my time to figure it out how to get back in (plus they keep telling me they're going to terminate it, which is exactly what I want them to do!).
  - Jonovono 5y ago
    I got this too, and they did eventually terminating my account. I missed all the emails tho, but when I went to use AWS for some project I found out I was terminated and the only way for me to use AWS again was to create a new account (I emailed them, they can't un terminate me)
    - atatatat 5y ago
      Same thing happened here — for $23 instead of .23¢. What a dysfunctional service.
vyrotek 5y ago
A few years ago I felt just a blind about billing but the latest stuff seem pretty well tracked and reported in the portal.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  I'm glad they have made progress in that area. As others have pointed out it can sometimes be tough to track down sources of costs in AWS as well (especially if you accidentally started something in a zone you don't normally play in). I'm still gunshy though. AWS have a setting in their billing that can fire off if you have exceeded a certain threshold which would be pretty much invaluable if you're running something that auto-scales.
MonaroVXR 5y ago
Oh no, I never forget the HN story on the expert losing 80K on AWS.
- smackeyacky 5y ago
  This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719573
a5aAqU 5y ago
> AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console. The first few times I used AWS for tutorials, something similar happened to me. I thought I shut everything down, but kept getting billed and wasn't able to find it without contacting them. It was just a few dollars, but I've been wary about any services where you can't cap the billing. Cloud platforms generally don't let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. I prefer using services like DigitalOcean or Linode where you can be sure that your new site crashes for 15 minutes instead of bankrupting you.
- StratusBen 5y ago
  Disclosure that I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Vantage - and used to work at both AWS and DigitalOcean....but this is a large reason we offer a fairly generous free tier on https://vantage.sh/ https://vantage.sh/ to help folks figure out where their costs are coming from to take action. It can be really frustrating and annoying when you can't hunt down where costs come from.
  - resonious 5y ago
    I'm nitpicking on unimportant details here but this seems like more of a general UI/UX problem than a free tier problem. AWS and Azure both have pretty straightforward free tiers, but people end up accidentally racking up large bills anyway. A UI to see a list of running services, sorted by cost either doesn't exist or is not prominent enough.
    - aaronblohowiak 5y ago
      vantage looks like a cost analyzer. vantage free tier will help you find non-free tier issues on AWS, if i understand the GP's point.
    - l-p 5y ago
      In Azure: Sidebar -> Cost Management + Billing -> Cost Management -> Cost analysis (preview). It's slow, you can't open links in new tabs, one wrong click and you have navigate to the right page and wait for everything to refresh again, but you can get the list of billed items. Plus a "Other subscription charges" that contains some mystery costs not linked to anything.
jchw 5y ago
I know Google burns through user trust like it’s incense candles, and so people fear of losing their account access or features being deprecated without notice, but, I really think GCP is underrated. In GCP, it’s easy and best practice to group things into granular projects, and if you want to, you can shut down an entire project all at once. The billing story isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad either, and it’s not the only thing going for it. I know I’m inviting replies airing grievances with GCP, and there certainly are many, but I’ve come to really like what it offers. Especially, GKE is really cool and at least to me feels very whole-assed as far as Kubernetes offerings go. Obviously that would make sense, but still, it really is nice to use.
- snoman 5y ago
  That billing model makes it very easy to find out what the operational cost of a particular product/service/team is costing the business and I think it's one of the advantages that GCP has, personally.
- virgilp 5y ago
  It's the same in Azure, really. It forces you to setup a resource group for everything (can't have any resources outside a resource group). If you're trying something out - just put them all in same resource group, and at the end delete the resource group.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    All the Azure tutorials are structured this way, and they frequently end by having you clean up your rg.
gitgud 5y ago
> "AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console." Same thing happened to me on AWS. I was trying to get a Windows VM in the cloud to run some CAD software. Ended up blowing through $500 credit in a week and shut it down before it went through the credit. Unexpected bills like that makes for a terrible experience to be honest...
benjaminwootton 5y ago
I had a $7k bill from AWS due to a bug in a SaaS product. They wouldn’t refund it. I wouldn’t use them again after that. I then tried to close down another account based on AWS organisations, and it was super complicated to get it all removed to stop billing to the extent I would have needed to hire an experienced consultant to do it rather than just click “close account.”
PureParadigm 5y ago
In Azure I put all my stuff in a new resource group and then when I'm done I just delete the entire resource group. This has worked well for me so far and I haven't had any surprise charges like I did on AWS and Digital Ocean.
- habibur 5y ago
  Thought Digital Ocean has fixed charge.
  - PureParadigm 5y ago
    I wanted to clear out my account so I deleted the VM but it didn't delete the associated static IP, so I got charged for the unused IP address that month. I didn't know the IP was still around until I got the bill. If this were in Azure I would have deleted the entire resource group and the IP would have gone along with it.
icy 5y ago
I'm a huge fan of Oracle's (yeah, I know right) free tier for especially this -- you can't accidentally use paid stuff without manually toggling an upgrade. It's such a relief to know that you can mess around with things and not be charged for it.
- ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
  That sounds really good, last thing I’d expect from Oracle - are you sure you don’t need to pay for an add-on for that :)
KronisLV 5y ago
You hear about all of these horror stories about services from IaaS/PaaS/SaaS providers essentially being black holes for money with no way to actually set hard limits for billing, even after all of these years and can't help but to think about more reasonable alternatives. Why not just use something like DigitalOcean (https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/), Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/), Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud), Contabo (https://contabo.com/en/ https://contabo.com/en/) or even smaller regional ones: personally i use Time4VPS in Lithuania because it's close to me (https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294, affiliate link to make my hosting cheaper if someone else registers)? Providers that just give you VPSes that you can run whatever containers on (or just host things the old fashioned way) and basically use whatever open source software that your project needs. More importantly, providers that give you predictable billing at a flat figure per month (or less, if your VPS isn't active all of the month) and simply slow down your network connection if the set limits are exceeded. If you're just doing something to practice and haven't sold out to SaaSS (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...), you probably really don't need to worry about scaling just yet - you can migrate over to AWS, GCP, Azure, or any other of the large providers at any time, by just running your containers on their scalable infrastructure, if there's even any point in doing that, since the smaller providers also can scale similarly in most cases. Lastly, it just feels dangerous to give AWS, GCP, Azure or any other entity that's known to give people insane bills your personal details and personal credit/debit card details - what if they decide to block you because you can't pay and your complaint doesn't become popular on Reddit or HackerNews? It almost feels like setting up a shell company and using limited virtual credit cards would be more reasonable, same as people always say that you should have a separate Google account for your personal needs and anything in any professional capacity, so nothing gets blanket banned. Sadly, there aren't many tutorials that start with: "Here's how you set up a company that's detached from your personal details, and here's how to easily make one credit card per vendor." Honestly, even the internal workings of companies like https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ are unclear to me.
- isatty 5y ago
snuser 5y ago
Similar happened to me, for less money though clicking around in visual studio. I thought I'd deleted the resources but months later I was getting emails about past due charges
raxxorrax 5y ago
I never use AWS or Azure privately. Everything I test I do on company or customer credit. You also more or less have to believe what they say you used in CPU time, storage is a bit easier to check. But even with a simple webservice you quickly get to 50 - 100$ alone from testing and deployment. I heavily recommend to rent a server for private use. They are always the cheaper option at fixed costs. Of course you don't have those fancy services... I only use a virtual server right now and pay $45 quarterly with domain. It still does have quite a lot of power though.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
Just one thing: credit card. Once they have all details, they can do whatever they want with you. They can let you go - but that's only their good will. Personally I'm in love with Hetzner cloud. It has less "features" (=proprietary complexity) than AWS/Azure, but I can understand everything perfectly and, most importantly, I have a guarantee I won't be charged over a limit.
tomerv 5y ago
I've had a $1.5/month charge on AWS that I tried repeatedly to track down but failed each time. Eventually I just let it run until I canceled my credit card.
Havoc 5y ago
>They keep reminding me I have $50 of test/dev credit on Azure through my Visual Studio subscription but it flat out frightens me to even try to use it. The VS credits are hard capped. At least they were on my account (didn't even have a credit card loaded)

mrits 5y ago

It took me 2 years to get AWS to stop billing me a few cents a month. I didn't try that hard but every month or so I'd get another bill for like 23 cents. I'd login and try to figure out what was still turned on.

foolfoolz 5y ago
i have this happening on gcp and aws. i get a text from my credit card each month for like 10-25 cents. i’ve gone in multiple times all the consoles show $0 it’s impossible to track down. it’s so cheap i haven’t cared enough to dig more
- bspammer 5y ago
  https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=2021&month=9 https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=202... This page should show you a full breakdown of exactly what’s costing you money across all regions.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Yep. I have some one cent a month bill from GCP from Hackathon days.
  - citizenpaul 5y ago
    There is a good chance all of you have a reserved IP address floating around somewhere in the settings. It costs like .05 a month
- dilyevsky 5y ago
  Both services have billing breakdowns by sku. Are you saying it shows nothing?
Aeolun 5y ago
I found the solution to that problem. I just actually use AWS for some stuff now, and my bill turned into a nice $20 ish dollars :P
mey 5y ago
Have had AWS tell us to chargeback a payment that we couldn't cancel.
jonas21 5y ago
AWS has been billing me a few cents per month for over a decade now. Eventually, the credit card I was using expired, and so every month for the past 7 years, they've sent me an email: > Dear Amazon Web Services Customer, > Your AWS Account is about to be suspended. There is still an outstanding payment problem with your account, as our previous communications did not lead to successful payment of your past due AWS charges. > We were unable to charge your credit card for the amount of $0.26 for your use of AWS services during the month of Aug-2021. We will attempt to collect this amount again. Unless we are successful in collecting the balance of $0.26 in full by 09/30/2021, your Amazon Web Services account may be suspended or terminated. The balance never increases, even though it always says the charges are from the previous month. It's as though they forget the balance each month because it's not worth collecting, then my account runs up another small charge, which they promptly forget. And of course they have yet to terminate the account. I would gladly close it myself, but I'm locked out, and it's not really worth my time to figure it out how to get back in (plus they keep telling me they're going to terminate it, which is exactly what I want them to do!).
- Jonovono 5y ago
  I got this too, and they did eventually terminating my account. I missed all the emails tho, but when I went to use AWS for some project I found out I was terminated and the only way for me to use AWS again was to create a new account (I emailed them, they can't un terminate me)
  - atatatat 5y ago
    Same thing happened here — for $23 instead of .23¢. What a dysfunctional service.

vyrotek 5y ago

A few years ago I felt just a blind about billing but the latest stuff seem pretty well tracked and reported in the portal.

smackeyacky 5y ago
I'm glad they have made progress in that area. As others have pointed out it can sometimes be tough to track down sources of costs in AWS as well (especially if you accidentally started something in a zone you don't normally play in). I'm still gunshy though. AWS have a setting in their billing that can fire off if you have exceeded a certain threshold which would be pretty much invaluable if you're running something that auto-scales.

MonaroVXR 5y ago

Oh no, I never forget the HN story on the expert losing 80K on AWS.

smackeyacky 5y ago
This one? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719573 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22719573

a5aAqU 5y ago

> AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console. The first few times I used AWS for tutorials, something similar happened to me. I thought I shut everything down, but kept getting billed and wasn't able to find it without contacting them. It was just a few dollars, but I've been wary about any services where you can't cap the billing. Cloud platforms generally don't let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. I prefer using services like DigitalOcean or Linode where you can be sure that your new site crashes for 15 minutes instead of bankrupting you.

StratusBen 5y ago
Disclosure that I'm the Co-Founder and CEO of Vantage - and used to work at both AWS and DigitalOcean....but this is a large reason we offer a fairly generous free tier on https://vantage.sh/ https://vantage.sh/ to help folks figure out where their costs are coming from to take action. It can be really frustrating and annoying when you can't hunt down where costs come from.
- resonious 5y ago
  I'm nitpicking on unimportant details here but this seems like more of a general UI/UX problem than a free tier problem. AWS and Azure both have pretty straightforward free tiers, but people end up accidentally racking up large bills anyway. A UI to see a list of running services, sorted by cost either doesn't exist or is not prominent enough.
  - aaronblohowiak 5y ago
    vantage looks like a cost analyzer. vantage free tier will help you find non-free tier issues on AWS, if i understand the GP's point.
  - l-p 5y ago
    In Azure: Sidebar -> Cost Management + Billing -> Cost Management -> Cost analysis (preview). It's slow, you can't open links in new tabs, one wrong click and you have navigate to the right page and wait for everything to refresh again, but you can get the list of billed items. Plus a "Other subscription charges" that contains some mystery costs not linked to anything.

jchw 5y ago

I know Google burns through user trust like it’s incense candles, and so people fear of losing their account access or features being deprecated without notice, but, I really think GCP is underrated. In GCP, it’s easy and best practice to group things into granular projects, and if you want to, you can shut down an entire project all at once. The billing story isn’t perfect, but it’s not bad either, and it’s not the only thing going for it. I know I’m inviting replies airing grievances with GCP, and there certainly are many, but I’ve come to really like what it offers. Especially, GKE is really cool and at least to me feels very whole-assed as far as Kubernetes offerings go. Obviously that would make sense, but still, it really is nice to use.

snoman 5y ago
That billing model makes it very easy to find out what the operational cost of a particular product/service/team is costing the business and I think it's one of the advantages that GCP has, personally.
virgilp 5y ago
It's the same in Azure, really. It forces you to setup a resource group for everything (can't have any resources outside a resource group). If you're trying something out - just put them all in same resource group, and at the end delete the resource group.
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  All the Azure tutorials are structured this way, and they frequently end by having you clean up your rg.

gitgud 5y ago

> "AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console." Same thing happened to me on AWS. I was trying to get a Windows VM in the cloud to run some CAD software. Ended up blowing through $500 credit in a week and shut it down before it went through the credit. Unexpected bills like that makes for a terrible experience to be honest...

benjaminwootton 5y ago

I had a $7k bill from AWS due to a bug in a SaaS product. They wouldn’t refund it. I wouldn’t use them again after that. I then tried to close down another account based on AWS organisations, and it was super complicated to get it all removed to stop billing to the extent I would have needed to hire an experienced consultant to do it rather than just click “close account.”

PureParadigm 5y ago

In Azure I put all my stuff in a new resource group and then when I'm done I just delete the entire resource group. This has worked well for me so far and I haven't had any surprise charges like I did on AWS and Digital Ocean.

habibur 5y ago
Thought Digital Ocean has fixed charge.
- PureParadigm 5y ago
  I wanted to clear out my account so I deleted the VM but it didn't delete the associated static IP, so I got charged for the unused IP address that month. I didn't know the IP was still around until I got the bill. If this were in Azure I would have deleted the entire resource group and the IP would have gone along with it.

icy 5y ago

I'm a huge fan of Oracle's (yeah, I know right) free tier for especially this -- you can't accidentally use paid stuff without manually toggling an upgrade. It's such a relief to know that you can mess around with things and not be charged for it.

ed_elliott_asc 5y ago
That sounds really good, last thing I’d expect from Oracle - are you sure you don’t need to pay for an add-on for that :)

KronisLV 5y ago

You hear about all of these horror stories about services from IaaS/PaaS/SaaS providers essentially being black holes for money with no way to actually set hard limits for billing, even after all of these years and can't help but to think about more reasonable alternatives. Why not just use something like DigitalOcean (https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/ https://www.digitalocean.com/products/droplets/), Vultr (https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/ https://www.vultr.com/products/cloud-compute/), Hetzner (https://www.hetzner.com/cloud https://www.hetzner.com/cloud), Contabo (https://contabo.com/en/ https://contabo.com/en/) or even smaller regional ones: personally i use Time4VPS in Lithuania because it's close to me (https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294 https://www.time4vps.com/?affid=5294, affiliate link to make my hosting cheaper if someone else registers)? Providers that just give you VPSes that you can run whatever containers on (or just host things the old fashioned way) and basically use whatever open source software that your project needs. More importantly, providers that give you predictable billing at a flat figure per month (or less, if your VPS isn't active all of the month) and simply slow down your network connection if the set limits are exceeded. If you're just doing something to practice and haven't sold out to SaaSS (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...), you probably really don't need to worry about scaling just yet - you can migrate over to AWS, GCP, Azure, or any other of the large providers at any time, by just running your containers on their scalable infrastructure, if there's even any point in doing that, since the smaller providers also can scale similarly in most cases. Lastly, it just feels dangerous to give AWS, GCP, Azure or any other entity that's known to give people insane bills your personal details and personal credit/debit card details - what if they decide to block you because you can't pay and your complaint doesn't become popular on Reddit or HackerNews? It almost feels like setting up a shell company and using limited virtual credit cards would be more reasonable, same as people always say that you should have a separate Google account for your personal needs and anything in any professional capacity, so nothing gets blanket banned. Sadly, there aren't many tutorials that start with: "Here's how you set up a company that's detached from your personal details, and here's how to easily make one credit card per vendor." Honestly, even the internal workings of companies like https://privacy.com/ https://privacy.com/ are unclear to me.

isatty 5y ago

snuser 5y ago

Similar happened to me, for less money though clicking around in visual studio. I thought I'd deleted the resources but months later I was getting emails about past due charges

raxxorrax 5y ago

I never use AWS or Azure privately. Everything I test I do on company or customer credit. You also more or less have to believe what they say you used in CPU time, storage is a bit easier to check. But even with a simple webservice you quickly get to 50 - 100$ alone from testing and deployment. I heavily recommend to rent a server for private use. They are always the cheaper option at fixed costs. Of course you don't have those fancy services... I only use a virtual server right now and pay $45 quarterly with domain. It still does have quite a lot of power though.

hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago

Just one thing: credit card. Once they have all details, they can do whatever they want with you. They can let you go - but that's only their good will. Personally I'm in love with Hetzner cloud. It has less "features" (=proprietary complexity) than AWS/Azure, but I can understand everything perfectly and, most importantly, I have a guarantee I won't be charged over a limit.

tomerv 5y ago

I've had a $1.5/month charge on AWS that I tried repeatedly to track down but failed each time. Eventually I just let it run until I canceled my credit card.

Havoc 5y ago

>They keep reminding me I have $50 of test/dev credit on Azure through my Visual Studio subscription but it flat out frightens me to even try to use it. The VS credits are hard capped. At least they were on my account (didn't even have a credit card loaded)