I had an AWS account I wasn't using, but I didn't want to get surprised by any bills, so I set an alert to let me know when the bill was more than $0.
Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself.
I closed it altogether after that. It's better for my sanity to just use a new email address and sign up again than to worry about surprise bills.
EDIT: It's entirely possible that I set it up wrong, or set up the wrong thing, but in any case an alert was all I was trying to do, and as far as I could tell that's what happened. I must admit I rage-quit rather than investigate too deeply.
> Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself.
They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge for that.
Charging per request for something that has a cost to provide is reasonable (and it's a tiny charge in this case, $3.50/million or 0.00035 cents per request).
Otherwise there's no incentive for application developers to optimize their usage.
In my last company we charged per unit of work, but it was possible to send a lot of requests to do a tiny amount of work -- some customers hammered us with millions of requests to do each unit of work. It wasn't malicious and it worked with their workflow, but we lost money on those customers due to all of the infrastructure required for the request routing.
The company eventually started charging a nominal fee per request, which resolved the issue.
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service, and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API gateway (or any load balancer).
I've never used AWS so perhaps I'm mistaken, but api gateways normally provide extra functionality on top of just proxying the request. You can still set up a server listening on port 80 or 443 with a public IP and make requests to it without being charged per request.
I had an AWS account I wasn't using, but I didn't want to get surprised by any bills, so I set an alert to let me know when the bill was more than $0.
Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself.
I closed it altogether after that. It's better for my sanity to just use a new email address and sign up again than to worry about surprise bills.
EDIT: It's entirely possible that I set it up wrong, or set up the wrong thing, but in any case an alert was all I was trying to do, and as far as I could tell that's what happened. I must admit I rage-quit rather than investigate too deeply.