6 ms·

You deleted everything and AWS is still charging you?

46 points by ke4qqq 7mo ago

richbell 7mo ago
AWS sends me an invoice for $0.01 every month.
- comrade1234 7mo ago
  tbh, I'd send them 5 cents and see what happens.
  - aljgz 7mo ago
    You'd be charged 200$ for manual accounting effort to figure out the mismatch
- bluefirebrand 7mo ago
  They send me an invoice for $0.00 and I cannot seem to convince them to stop
  - comrade1234 7mo ago
    Just pay it, freeloader.
  - pja 7mo ago
    > They send me an invoice for $0.00 and I cannot seem to convince them to stop Same here! Am I being charged a fractional cent rounded down to 0? Who knows!?
  - autoexec 7mo ago
    I'd get out the checkbook for this. It'd be worth a stamp on the off chance they actually tried to cash it.
- JasonHarrison 7mo ago
  Me too! AWS actually charges my credit card $0.01 every month. I'm surprised they don’t just waive low balances, like many banks do [0] How is it economical for AWS to charge a credit card for a penny? I wonder what Amazon’s agreements with interchange networks must be like... [0]: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/small-balance-waiver-a-k-a-lots-of-free-99-cent-amazon-gcs/ https://www.doctorofcredit.com/small-balance-waiver-a-k-a-lo...
mikkupikku 7mo ago
The way this guy writes makes me want to puke. "Whoa dude, the hidden setting in AWS got you charged and now you're warning your friends about it? That's uncool dude, you're discouraging them from learning! As a Developer Advocate, let me advocate the corporations interests to you, the developer."
- yibers 7mo ago
  No way this is being written seriously, is it?
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
wbobeirne 7mo ago
> AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap. The purpose of this post is to shed some light on this. Or it's a UX gap. If this is such a common complaint that's causing meaningful reputation damage, surely there'd be a better way to communicate this in the product? I think it's fair to assume that there's less interest in building features that encourage users to spend less money.
- L-four 7mo ago
  The number one feature which would resolve this is. A list all resources page.
  - redserk 7mo ago
    Agreed. AWS is downright hostile about giving you any idea about what resources you actually have deployed, to the point where it must be deliberately malicious. Even their billing page is terrible for tracing down the root cause of usage with the default configuration. You have to go into third party tooling if you want any chance of seeing what’s actually going on, especially if there’s any odds of you deploying stuff in another region and even moreso if you have more than 1 account. At this point, I’d say it should be a best practice of owning 2 AWS accounts, even as a hobbyist: one payer account with a HEAVILY locked down SCP and then a child account with the stuff you’re deploying.
- flowerbreeze 7mo ago
  It's the UX, deliberately omitting information or not. There at least used to be some toggles for example without any indication that they mean anything other than a minor load balancer configuration change, but caused I think $200 month bill addition. No indication at all that they have a meaningful monetary impact.
- 0manrho 7mo ago
  Or they're charging people in at-best mysterious if not outright duplicitous/malicious ways because it makes them money without having to do anything (save for send a bill and have the right fine print in the right places. ) It's no accident, it's not just "bad UX", it's deliberate. > AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap. Observe the mental gymnastics to explain away "mysterious ways" by making it the users fault and calling them - *checks notes* - stupid, for not knowing something AWS is very intentionally keen on you not knowing. I sure hope OP was getting payed for this AWS ad, imagine shilling for a multi-billion dollar company for free.
dsr_ 7mo ago
"Here’s the part that actually gets to me as a Developer Advocate. When a student gets a surprise bill, they don’t usually think “I missed a step in my cleanup.” They think “AWS secretly charges you even after you delete stuff.” They tell their classmates and that becomes the narrative. I’ve heard it in person, on discord, etc. “Be careful with AWS, they’ll charge you for nothing.” It’s not cool because it can scare people away from learning skills that would genuinely help their careers." Maybe it teaches some of them not to stick their hand in lawnmowers. When I was a student, I had an account at Citizens Bank, which had a branch on-campus. I pretty much never used it: I put some money in at the beginning, occasionally added some; used the ATM from time to time. At the end of four years, I decided to close my account. There was less money in there than I thought there should be. I demanded an accounting. They happily demonstrated that there was a disclosed-only-in-fine-print fee charged each month that I didn't use the account according to some arcane formula. They wouldn't refund the fee. So for the thirty or forty years since, I've never used Citizens Bank for anything, even if it would have been convenient. And I discouraged other people from doing so. I imagine I've cost them several thousand times those fees in revenue over the years. Anyway, this is a story about AWS and their no-good, horrible-by-design billing practices.
- knollimar 7mo ago
  Microsoft charged me 2 cents per month for 4 months and I couldn't do anything about it because they have a delay on closing accounts. It felt like a scam gym membership, but for 8 cents.
- ralferoo 7mo ago
  Reminds me of a bank account I had in Australia back in 1999 (I think it was Commonwealth Bank). I'd opened it as I was there travelling for a year and it made EFTPOS (early payment by card) easier and cheaper than using my UK bank card. At the end of the year of travel, I went into the branch to close the account and they said I couldn't close it because I couldn't withdraw the remaining $2.11 because it was lower than the minimum withdrawal amount (I think maybe $10) and that I should just leave it open. About a year later, I got the latest 6 month statement that they'd posted internationally saying that my account was now $100 ish overdrawn, because they'd started charging me a monthly fee on the account, and somehow I was just expected to have known that. The previous statement hadn't mentioned it, they'd just started charging it because they'd introduced a fee for accounts with a low balance. It took about several long international phone calls (and back then they were about $0.40 per minute, at least one was probably an hour long) to convince them that I had no plans to return to Australia in the foreseeable future, or to pay them the account fee especially given that I had attempted to close the account previously and they refused, and finally they agreed to close the account and waive the fee. But I'd spent loads in charges on the international calls, and they'd posted me a statement twice printed on heavy non-airmail paper, all because they wouldn't just let me shut my account when I originally asked in branch to do it. 25 years later and I still haven't gone back to Australia, even though it was one of the best years of my life. I'm going blame the bank for that (even though it was really just not having the opportunity to go again!)
dhblumenfeld1 7mo ago
I recently dealt with something similar with a CDN I used for a project 3 years ago. They kept charging me $0.01/month after I got all of my content off of their servers. Took months to resolve, luckily was pennies so it wasn't a big deal but very frustrating.
- s7b4 7mo ago
  I had the same thing happen to me where I would get a charge for $0.02 every few months from AWS. It was so insignificant that I didn't care to fix it straight away but I was getting concerned that the account might be compromised or the likes. I'm not a regular AWS user so it was actually a huge pain in the ass tracking down what exactly I had to do, compared to more "traditional" hosting platforms. I get that there are safety precautions in place instead of just allowing blowing the entire account away but damn it's annoying.
Ensorceled 7mo ago
Interesting that the author flags what is actually one of my pet peeves ... > [Snapshots] get created automatically, often during deletion workflows, and nobody thinks to look for them. creating random backups of things you are shutting down "just in case" that you must then remember to go back and delete. It's especially annoying if you stood up an EC2 instance or whatever, realized you messed up the configuration and immediately shut it down. Now you have a pile of poop running up your bill that you need to find and delete.
sjkoelle 7mo ago
this happened to me. they refunded me after i contacted support!
yardie 7mo ago
They send me an email every month stating I owe $0.28 or they 'll close the account. It's been 5 years now.
QGQBGdeZREunxLe 7mo ago
We used to use this at work https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke
nitwit005 7mo ago
> I used to feel this. Old you was right. No student should ever enter personal payment information into AWS. You cannot afford the mistake. They have chosen not to make a safe way to use it without financial risks.
calmbonsai 7mo ago
[flagged]
- razingeden 7mo ago
  And a random string of gibberish to you as well, sir.
  - calmbonsai 7mo ago
    Huh? These are links to tools and services that are de-facto standards to control AWS inventory/spend and directly address the concerns raised in the initial blog. How is any of this gibberish?
ikidd 7mo ago
This sounds almost as hard as changing your email address on your Cursor account. I don't wish that experience on anyone. Anthropic is almost as bad, but at least they can be arsed to get back to you eventually. For the uninitiated, both of them require you to make a new account, because apparently billion dollar corporations think a system that uses your email address as an immutable foreign key constraint is just fine. Cursor won't let you bill out the outstanding API amount until the end of your subscription period, so you can cancel the account but it sits there able to be logged into and reactivated until your billing completes at the end of the billing interval. Getting a response to any sort of attempts to sort this out is pretty much yelling into the void. Really, your choice is to cancel the card if you get your email hacked. At least Anthropic gets back to you and shuts it down manually, and I was even refunded my months subscription fees even though I didn't ask for it. But still a stupid, stupid way to change an email address.

46 points by ke4qqq 7mo ago

richbell 7mo ago

AWS sends me an invoice for $0.01 every month.

comrade1234 7mo ago
tbh, I'd send them 5 cents and see what happens.
- aljgz 7mo ago
  You'd be charged 200$ for manual accounting effort to figure out the mismatch
bluefirebrand 7mo ago
They send me an invoice for $0.00 and I cannot seem to convince them to stop
- comrade1234 7mo ago
  Just pay it, freeloader.
- pja 7mo ago
  > They send me an invoice for $0.00 and I cannot seem to convince them to stop Same here! Am I being charged a fractional cent rounded down to 0? Who knows!?
- autoexec 7mo ago
  I'd get out the checkbook for this. It'd be worth a stamp on the off chance they actually tried to cash it.
JasonHarrison 7mo ago
Me too! AWS actually charges my credit card $0.01 every month. I'm surprised they don’t just waive low balances, like many banks do [0] How is it economical for AWS to charge a credit card for a penny? I wonder what Amazon’s agreements with interchange networks must be like... [0]: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/small-balance-waiver-a-k-a-lots-of-free-99-cent-amazon-gcs/ https://www.doctorofcredit.com/small-balance-waiver-a-k-a-lo...

mikkupikku 7mo ago

The way this guy writes makes me want to puke. "Whoa dude, the hidden setting in AWS got you charged and now you're warning your friends about it? That's uncool dude, you're discouraging them from learning! As a Developer Advocate, let me advocate the corporations interests to you, the developer."

yibers 7mo ago
No way this is being written seriously, is it?
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

wbobeirne 7mo ago

> AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap. The purpose of this post is to shed some light on this. Or it's a UX gap. If this is such a common complaint that's causing meaningful reputation damage, surely there'd be a better way to communicate this in the product? I think it's fair to assume that there's less interest in building features that encourage users to spend less money.

L-four 7mo ago
The number one feature which would resolve this is. A list all resources page.
- redserk 7mo ago
  Agreed. AWS is downright hostile about giving you any idea about what resources you actually have deployed, to the point where it must be deliberately malicious. Even their billing page is terrible for tracing down the root cause of usage with the default configuration. You have to go into third party tooling if you want any chance of seeing what’s actually going on, especially if there’s any odds of you deploying stuff in another region and even moreso if you have more than 1 account. At this point, I’d say it should be a best practice of owning 2 AWS accounts, even as a hobbyist: one payer account with a HEAVILY locked down SCP and then a child account with the stuff you’re deploying.
flowerbreeze 7mo ago
It's the UX, deliberately omitting information or not. There at least used to be some toggles for example without any indication that they mean anything other than a minor load balancer configuration change, but caused I think $200 month bill addition. No indication at all that they have a meaningful monetary impact.
0manrho 7mo ago
Or they're charging people in at-best mysterious if not outright duplicitous/malicious ways because it makes them money without having to do anything (save for send a bill and have the right fine print in the right places. ) It's no accident, it's not just "bad UX", it's deliberate. > AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap. Observe the mental gymnastics to explain away "mysterious ways" by making it the users fault and calling them - *checks notes* - stupid, for not knowing something AWS is very intentionally keen on you not knowing. I sure hope OP was getting payed for this AWS ad, imagine shilling for a multi-billion dollar company for free.

dsr_ 7mo ago

"Here’s the part that actually gets to me as a Developer Advocate. When a student gets a surprise bill, they don’t usually think “I missed a step in my cleanup.” They think “AWS secretly charges you even after you delete stuff.” They tell their classmates and that becomes the narrative. I’ve heard it in person, on discord, etc. “Be careful with AWS, they’ll charge you for nothing.” It’s not cool because it can scare people away from learning skills that would genuinely help their careers." Maybe it teaches some of them not to stick their hand in lawnmowers. When I was a student, I had an account at Citizens Bank, which had a branch on-campus. I pretty much never used it: I put some money in at the beginning, occasionally added some; used the ATM from time to time. At the end of four years, I decided to close my account. There was less money in there than I thought there should be. I demanded an accounting. They happily demonstrated that there was a disclosed-only-in-fine-print fee charged each month that I didn't use the account according to some arcane formula. They wouldn't refund the fee. So for the thirty or forty years since, I've never used Citizens Bank for anything, even if it would have been convenient. And I discouraged other people from doing so. I imagine I've cost them several thousand times those fees in revenue over the years. Anyway, this is a story about AWS and their no-good, horrible-by-design billing practices.

knollimar 7mo ago
Microsoft charged me 2 cents per month for 4 months and I couldn't do anything about it because they have a delay on closing accounts. It felt like a scam gym membership, but for 8 cents.
ralferoo 7mo ago
Reminds me of a bank account I had in Australia back in 1999 (I think it was Commonwealth Bank). I'd opened it as I was there travelling for a year and it made EFTPOS (early payment by card) easier and cheaper than using my UK bank card. At the end of the year of travel, I went into the branch to close the account and they said I couldn't close it because I couldn't withdraw the remaining $2.11 because it was lower than the minimum withdrawal amount (I think maybe $10) and that I should just leave it open. About a year later, I got the latest 6 month statement that they'd posted internationally saying that my account was now $100 ish overdrawn, because they'd started charging me a monthly fee on the account, and somehow I was just expected to have known that. The previous statement hadn't mentioned it, they'd just started charging it because they'd introduced a fee for accounts with a low balance. It took about several long international phone calls (and back then they were about $0.40 per minute, at least one was probably an hour long) to convince them that I had no plans to return to Australia in the foreseeable future, or to pay them the account fee especially given that I had attempted to close the account previously and they refused, and finally they agreed to close the account and waive the fee. But I'd spent loads in charges on the international calls, and they'd posted me a statement twice printed on heavy non-airmail paper, all because they wouldn't just let me shut my account when I originally asked in branch to do it. 25 years later and I still haven't gone back to Australia, even though it was one of the best years of my life. I'm going blame the bank for that (even though it was really just not having the opportunity to go again!)

dhblumenfeld1 7mo ago

I recently dealt with something similar with a CDN I used for a project 3 years ago. They kept charging me $0.01/month after I got all of my content off of their servers. Took months to resolve, luckily was pennies so it wasn't a big deal but very frustrating.

s7b4 7mo ago
I had the same thing happen to me where I would get a charge for $0.02 every few months from AWS. It was so insignificant that I didn't care to fix it straight away but I was getting concerned that the account might be compromised or the likes. I'm not a regular AWS user so it was actually a huge pain in the ass tracking down what exactly I had to do, compared to more "traditional" hosting platforms. I get that there are safety precautions in place instead of just allowing blowing the entire account away but damn it's annoying.

Ensorceled 7mo ago

Interesting that the author flags what is actually one of my pet peeves ... > [Snapshots] get created automatically, often during deletion workflows, and nobody thinks to look for them. creating random backups of things you are shutting down "just in case" that you must then remember to go back and delete. It's especially annoying if you stood up an EC2 instance or whatever, realized you messed up the configuration and immediately shut it down. Now you have a pile of poop running up your bill that you need to find and delete.

sjkoelle 7mo ago

this happened to me. they refunded me after i contacted support!

yardie 7mo ago

They send me an email every month stating I owe $0.28 or they 'll close the account. It's been 5 years now.

QGQBGdeZREunxLe 7mo ago

We used to use this at work https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke

nitwit005 7mo ago

> I used to feel this. Old you was right. No student should ever enter personal payment information into AWS. You cannot afford the mistake. They have chosen not to make a safe way to use it without financial risks.

calmbonsai 7mo ago

[flagged]

razingeden 7mo ago
And a random string of gibberish to you as well, sir.
- calmbonsai 7mo ago
  Huh? These are links to tools and services that are de-facto standards to control AWS inventory/spend and directly address the concerns raised in the initial blog. How is any of this gibberish?

ikidd 7mo ago

This sounds almost as hard as changing your email address on your Cursor account. I don't wish that experience on anyone. Anthropic is almost as bad, but at least they can be arsed to get back to you eventually. For the uninitiated, both of them require you to make a new account, because apparently billion dollar corporations think a system that uses your email address as an immutable foreign key constraint is just fine. Cursor won't let you bill out the outstanding API amount until the end of your subscription period, so you can cancel the account but it sits there able to be logged into and reactivated until your billing completes at the end of the billing interval. Getting a response to any sort of attempts to sort this out is pretty much yelling into the void. Really, your choice is to cancel the card if you get your email hacked. At least Anthropic gets back to you and shuts it down manually, and I was even refunded my months subscription fees even though I didn't ask for it. But still a stupid, stupid way to change an email address.