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"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding. Building a business on blank cheques and accide
by modernerd 2y ago
"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding.
Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for my house", the less they'll want to explore your offerings.
- xnx 2y ago> give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding GCP requires this when you set up a new project. GCP deserves as much credit as AWS does scorn.
- amelius 2y agoIt's already ridiculous that the contracts are always one-sided. It is not a consumer service after all.
- Melonotromo 2y agoI'm saying this for years and deleted all my personal credit cards on cloud providers which can scale/bankrupt me in a minute.
- KelvinFineBoy69 2y ago[dead]
- theanonymousone 2y ago> It's also a large barrier to adoption. e.g. for me. I never dared to get my foot wet with AWS, despite interest. Better safe with a cheap, flat-rate VPS than sorry.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoI've also shot myself in the foot with various APIs, e.g. I racked a 3k bill in a month with Google APIs for my side project, just because I wasn't checking the usage, I didn't think I was using that much. This is more of my fault I guess, but luckily support waived that fee for me after some back and forth. Also I'm not from the US so this bill is larger for me compared to US folks. But honestly also Google APIs are pretty expensive. For hosting my side projects I use a single dedicated DO droplet for $320 a month, where I have 40+ docker containers.
- Aeolun 2y agoThat’s still very expensive. At that point you’d be well served by going dedicated hardware.
- mewpmewp2 2y agoThe droplet I have is 32 GB ram, 160 GB disk, 16 vCPUs (dedicated CPU, Regular Intel). What would you suggest me instead? I see Hetzner and maybe OVH could cost significantly less. Actually looks like with Hetzner I would get better specs at 115 eur per month. With 16 vCP, 64GB ram, 360 GB SSD. That's crazy, I didn't realize there's such a huge difference. I think your comment is actually impressively valuable to me... I'm going to bring it all over during the weekend. That's really exciting to find out much cheaper prices, because I've had disk space running out constantly on my DO. I do all my docker builds, files, databases and everything there as well. And for side projects I usually value all the cache and development speed as opposed to trying to optimize everything to take min performance and storage. Also I spend way too much on Supabase. I think also $300+/month and increasing, I will bring that over and self host with a large SSD. I think at this point I prefer self hosting a postgres anyway to Supabase. I just tried it for a while, but the costs started going up. Thank you so much. Edit: there's some limits in Hetzner initially, so it might take few months before I can actually migrate.
- ayewo 2y agoAlso be aware it's not all roses with Hetzner. There are stories online of folks getting their accounts deactivated or not even getting approved. https://x.com/theo/status/1827480999305118135 https://x.com/theo/status/1827480999305118135 https://x.com/heyandras/status/1856747621962191126 https://x.com/heyandras/status/1856747621962191126
- mewpmewp2 2y agoI was able to buy a 8 vCPU instance right now - do you know how frequent this problem may be?
- lutoma 2y agoSame. I will never touch AWS because the risk of accidentally bankrupting our business due to some small configuration mistake is just way too large.
- dcminter 2y agoI have a personal account that I'm meticulously careful about (but still terrified of). I also have an account with L̵i̵n̵u̵x̵A̵c̵a̵d̵e̵m̵y̵ A̵C̵l̵o̵u̵d̵G̵u̵r̵u̵ PluralSight: and while the courses are very variable (and mostly exam cramming focused) it has their Cloud Playground as a super nice feature. I get four hours to play around with setting things up and then it will all get automatically torn down for me. There's no cloud bill, just my subscription (I think that's about $400pa at the moment - can't check right now as annoyingly their stuff is blocked by our corporate network!) It has a few limitations, but none that have been problems for me with exploring stuff so far.
- op00to 2y agoI miss my ACG account. I feel like the sandbox more cost effective than the Wild West of my company’s sandbox aws account.
- op00to 2y agoI use a visa gift card for AWS, I only risk what I have on the card.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- chx 2y ago> the less they'll want to explore your offerings. Honestly? All the better. There are obviously use cases where AWS is the right tool for the job but it's extremely rare. It's coasting on hype and somehow attaining "no one was ever fired for buying IBM" status.
- Retric 2y agoExcept people do get fired for choosing AWS and drastically increasing costs or making big mistakes that cost several times their annual salary. It’s just not the kind of thing you’re going to see in a blog post.
- weinzierl 2y agoIt's not just AWS. I think there are only two types of cloud providers: The ones like AWS and DigitalOcean that shift the risk to the customer and the ones that offer shady "unlimited" and "unmetered" plans. Neither is what I want. I wish there was a provider with clear and documented limits to allow proper capacity planning while at the same time shifting all the availability risk to the customer but taking on the financial risk. I'd be willing to pay a higher fixed price for that, as long as it is not excessive.
- devoutsalsa 2y agoBare metal server with unmetered bandwidth.
- _bare_metal 2y agoIndeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference : https://baremetalsavings.com https://baremetalsavings.com
- presentation 2y agoIf anything this makes me feel better since my workload doesn’t require very beefy machines and the amount id be saving is basically irrelevant compared to my labor costs.
- _bare_metal 2y agoYes, bare metal is not a panacea. Some use cases require 0 personnel change going bare metal (even having reduced labor), and some are very much the opposite.
- user432678 2y agoThis is really nice, thank you!
- tonetegeatinst 2y agoLove the tool and UI you built. I homelab and while not always on 24/7 its way more affordable to run on my own bare metal than pay a cloud provider. I also get super fast local speeds.
- soup10 2y agoSpend limits are such an obvious and necessary feature that the only reason they don't have them is shady business practices.
- lukeramsden 2y agoNot really. Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What do you do when people hit their hard spend limits, start shutting down their EC2 instances and deleting their data? I can see the argument that just because its "hard" doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, but it's disingenuous to say they're shady because they don't.
- codedokode 2y agoYou shut down their instances and keep the data for a week and delete it if they don't pay promptly. It's not very profitable though.
- Aeolun 2y agoThat’s what Hetzner does.
- soup10 2y agoset a policy for what happens when the spend limit is reached? not rocket science
- lucianbr 2y ago> Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What a ridiculous point. AWS achieves non-trivial things at scale all the time, and brag about it too. So many smart engineers with high salaries and they can't figure out a solution like "shut down instances so costs don't continue to grow, but keep the data so nothing critical is lost, at least for a limited time"? Disingenuous is what you are writing - oh no, it's a hard problem, they can't be expected to even try to solve it.
- benterix 2y ago
- Frieren 2y agoRegulate it. Asking Amazon to do something makes little sense. Create laws that force Amazon, and all the rest, to respect their users money. By default, corporations will do what makes them money, not what is ethical or good for the economy.
- briandear 2y agoYou trust the government far too much. Regulated industries always end up costing the consumer more. See: medical care and education for examples.
- ivan_gammel 2y agoOne of the most American things you’ll ever hear. No, regulation doesn’t cost more. In Germany education is essentially free (yes, I know, we pay it from taxes — it costs German taxpayers less than it costs American students). Healthcare kind of the same: we pay for insurance and then only occasionally have co-payments for extras, but costs again are much lower than in USA.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- kaycey2022 2y agoFunny how no one these days says, “in the uk healthcare is free”. I wonder how much longer till “x in Germany” falls in that bracket.
- Eisenstein 2y agoPeople were saying the same exact think about the Pure Food and Drug Act, and babies were actively dying by drinking milk with formaldehyde in it so that it lasted longer for sale.
- Xelbair 2y agowhat? Governments have a systematic pressure, at least in sane countries, to be at least partially responsible towards customers - their citizens and voters. Corporations do not. especially in businesses with high barriers to entry, and where they can vendor lock you.
- danw1979 2y agoI can see the value in a _choice_ between billing limits and billing alerts, for those customers who don’t want their resources ever to be forcibly shut down, but you’re right in saying that choice should be front-and-centre during account creation.
- hnben 2y agocould you set a limit to the credit-card associated with the cloud service? Or would it still create costs after the limit has run out, which they would collect in other ways?
- benterix 2y agoNo, setting a limit doesn't work. They will still try to charge you. A friend had a charge for $0.35 running for a year after his credit card expired. They closed his account later but would definitely come after you if the amount was significant.
- scott_w 2y agoThe latter: you've used the service so, even if your card rejected the payment, you'd still have a debt with your provider.
- slyall 2y agoDear Customer, You have reached your Configured Maximum Monthly Spend Limit. As per your settings we have removed all objects from S3, All RDS Databases, All Route53 Domains, all ESB volumes, all elastic IPs, All EC2 instances and all Snapshots. Please update your spend limit before you recreate the above. Yours, AWS
- paulgb 2y agoA compromise solution to this could be to block creation of new resources if their monthly cost would exceed the monthly limit, unless the customer increases the limit. It wouldn’t solve the problem for usage-based billing, but it would have solved the problem here.
- slyall 2y agoAll sorts of problems there. It means that you can't spin up a stack for an hour if the system calculates that leaving it online for a whole month would breach your limit. If the original author had a $100/month limit he wouldn't have been able to spin up the stack even once. Also you have variable costs (like s3 traffic) that could put you over your limit half way through the month. Then how does AWS stop you breaching your limit? On a more practical level I don't think AWS keeps tracks of bills on a minute-by-minute basis.
- paulgb 2y ago> It means that you can't spin up a stack for an hour if the system calculates that leaving it online for a whole month would breach your limit. Sort of related, another wishlist feature I have is a way to start an EC2 instance with a deadline up front, and have the machine automatically suspended or terminated if it exceeds the deadline. I have some programs that start an EC2 instance, do some work, and shut it down (e.g. AMI building), and I would sleep a tiny bit better at night if AWS could deadline the instance as a backstop in case my script unexpectedly died before it could. > Also you have variable costs (like s3 traffic) Yeah, that's what I mean by it wouldn't solve the problem of usage-based billing. There they could just cut you off, and I think that's the bargain that people who want hard caps are asking for (there is always a spend cap at which I'd assume something had gone horribly wrong and would rather not keep spending), but I agree that the lack of real-time billing data is probably what stops them there.
- spacebanana7 2y agoHard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application. Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen. Hard spend limits might make sense for indie / SME focused cloud vendors though.
- throw2343223434 2y agoBut the presence of a feature does not mean it has to be used?
- spacebanana7 2y agoThe accounting teams of many orgs would want this feature to be enabled, but the tech teams wouldn't. Asking AWS not to add this feature means the tech teams win the debate before it starts.
- kristiandupont 2y agoThat seems like a very hypothetical problem you are solving there..
- sigseg1v 2y agoI feel pain just reading this because I know where that guy is coming from; at many orgs as soon as some stupid thing is available it gets mandated by people who have no idea how it works or what impacts it will have, all the time. If it was just as simple as not enabling the stupid option surely we could just not ena... Excuse me for a minute, I have to go reset my password that expires every 10 days and can not match any previous password and enter my enterprise mandated sms 2fa because authenticator scary -- woops my SharePoint session expired after 120 seconds of inactivity let me just redo that -- oh what's that my corporate vpn disconnected because I don't have the mandatory patches applied, let me just restart -- Woah would you look at that my network interface doesn't work anymore after that update -- yes yes I'm sorry I know my activity light on MS Teams turned yellow for 5 minutes I'm working on it, just gotta do these other 12 steps so I can reset my password to -- oh look it's time to fill out the monthly company values survey, what's that, it's due by end of day?
- dragandj 2y agoAnd yet most people swarm around AWS and similar providers like there is no tomorrow despite this barrier for adoption. People ARE irrational...
- madeofpalk 2y agoI dont't think it is a meaningful barrier to adoption, at AWS's scale anymore. AWS's growth doesn't come from courting small random devs working on side projects.
- belter 2y agoAWS Budget Actions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide/budgets-controls.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...
- exhilaration 2y agoIt's been mentioned several time in HN comments that the AWS billing code is a giant pile of spaghetti and there is generally a lot of fear around making big changes to it. That's been one of the more interesting inside baseball facts I've learned here.
- bryancoxwell 2y agoWell done AWS for finding a way to make your technical debt cost other people money.
- rolandog 2y agoCompletely agree. Having worked previously for ... (humans?) ... I can authoritatively theorize it would be fixed in a jiffy if it weren't making them bucketloads of money. To make my case: just ponder the opposite: "What would an honest version of AWS do?". They would address the concerns publicly, document their progress towards fixing the issue, and even try to determine who was overcharged due to their faulty code, and offer them some compensation. "We're too big to fix our own code" is, sadly, taken from the MS playbook (IIRC, something like that was made public after the breach of MS manager mailboxes after the whole Azure breach fiasco that was discovered by, IIRC, the DOJ that paid to have access to logs).
- Imustaskforhelp 2y agoTotally agreed.
- rmbyrro 2y agoThe main question to me is: how the hell could two Open Search domains cost +$1k a month in the first place!? AWS prices are ridiculous. I pay OVH $18/mo for a 4-core, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD dedicated server. The cheapest on AWS would be r6g.xlarge, which costs $145/mo. Almost 10x. Yes, AWS hardware is usually better, but they give me 4 "vCPUs". OVH gives me 4 "real" CPU cores. There's a LOT of difference. E even if my processor is worse than AWS', I still prefer 4 real CPUs than virtual ones, which are overbooked by AWS and rarely give me 100% of their power. OVH gives me 300 Mbit, while r6g.xlarge gives "up to" 10 Gbit. But still, 10x? 300 Mbit gives me ~37 mb/s. I use a CDN for large stuff: HTML, images, JS, anyways... There are certainly cases where AWS is the go-to option, but I think it's a small minority where it actually makes sense.