| not OP i had set up some billing alerts on my AWS and it was just all terrible and sh*tty, clicking around in a million places to get not what i actually wanted. i thought about building my own service to just let me know a daily total of my expected bill at the end of the month then i'd add stuff to tell me about fast-increasing charges, as quickly as was necessary depending on the steepness of the charge rise curve. then i found Billgist, which i tried for a bit -- it worked great, looks great, etc., so i'm not building my own. no connection to them. https://www.billgist.com/ i used it at first just to see if it worked at all, then to see if it sucked (in which case I would prob try to build my own), and then ultimately to try to help me get comfortable with the idea that i probably wasn't going to wake up one beautiful Saturday morning to a $50k AWS bill. that never worked -- that is, i never got comfortable with the idea that I would _not_ wake up to a $50k AWS bill one beautiful Saturday morning -- it just seems completely plausible, even likely. so i shut down most of my aws stuff (i was always particularly worried about my Lambda stuff), moved some things to Digital Ocean, and i'm guessing i'll revisit AWS at some point when i reach some critical mass of: * "i actually need AWS", and
* "i actually have something to implement that has the possibility of making money", and
* "i'm comfortable, thru my own alerts/billing limits/cutoffs/aws-expertise, that i probably won't wake up to that $50k hacker AWS bill".
one thing i learned is that AWS charges you for _everything_ -- including your single daily API call to figure out how much you're going to owe at the end of the month -- the fee for that call is 3 cents per call, or at least for the first call.tho you can log in thru the console and check this estimate for free. one of the things you get charged for is 'Configs' -- pretty much any config setting you've customized in any way -- permissions, roles, tags (?), etc. i understand the logic, but damn -- i'm trying to use AWS so i can get things done, not so i can worry about the costs of every. single. not-completely-optimized. miniscule. design decision. down to the penny. nickle and diming would be a luxury. i can imagine my hypothetical company's AWS Cost Saving Specialist coming to me and saying, "I'm glad you've set up this incredibly fast and secure and resilient system, but....we need to save a few bucks, so....yeah, i'm gonna need you to come in tomorrow...." i may have a former co-worker that works there - if you run out of options i'll try to ping someone in my chain, see if i can contact them. |