[bstar77]

After my experience 3 years ago, I will never use them again. I priced out an instance that estimated around $30/month via their calculator. Instance is indeed around $30 for the first 2 months, then I get a $200 bill. I don't know what the hell happened, but it was over 6x what I had budgeted. I tried to get someone to review my account, but I didn't get a response and just had to suck it up. I paid the $200 and moved on. Never again, I'll use Linode or something else instead.

I clearly did something wrong, but the process was so confusing that I couldn't tell you what it was. It probably had to do with running the server at sub-optimal times when rates were higher, but I don't remember reading anything about that. It was a Windows-based game server, so the extra cpu overhead might have had something to do with it.

[rmason]

I'm using Google Fi. Once I exceed my paid for bandwidth level for a given month it notifies me. When I go 50% over it notifies me a second time. If I want to know the bandwidth used I can check it anytime I want on my phone.

Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

[hparadiz]

Google did this to me with Adwords. They gave me a "free" $200 to run a test campaign but it never turned off and I was not notified in anyway. They ended up charging me $800 for a completely test campaign for a non product blog website that ended up not even getting any traffic. Very scummy behavior even worse than AWS. It was basically extortion because I would have lost my entire Google account if I disputed the charges with my credit card.

[LdSGSgvupDV]

This is why I don't like to sign my credit card to any subscription service or anything similar. There is almost no way to delete the credit card, and it is hard to notice the charging before it happened. We should have legislation to make them offer one-shot charging without storing my payment information. Pay as my budget. Shutdown if exceed.

[Kye]

Privacy.com

Doesn't cost anything, can use different bank accounts for funding on a per card basis, configurable limits.

[bradknowles]

Except they are in the process of changing their bank that they work with, so that they can change the type of cards they issue, and you have until the end of December to change over all your old cards from the old format to the new one, which means changing the card numbers, too.

This is a royal pain in the ass for those of us with hundreds of cards registered through them.

If there was another service of this type that existed, I’d switch to them in a heartbeat. And I will no longer recommend them here.

[Kye]

1: That news popped up here after I posted this.

2: New accounts since around October are already on the new thing.

[howdydoo]

>how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

I don't want to be that guy who yells out from my armchair to say something is easy. But........ quota management at its core is incrementing a number, then reading the number back. AWS is already doing things plenty more complicated than that. I'm sure they could build this if they cared to.

[heavyset_go]

Other providers let users put billing limits on their accounts. Seems like Amazon benefits when users aren't able to put a $30 a month limit on their accounts like the OP wanted to.

[st3fan]

You are just making stuff up. AWS has all those things. Billing limits. Cost monitoring. It is all there.

[Etheryte]

If you have to be a domain expert to configure it correctly, as is clearly the case with AWS since configuring it is a whole separate industry, then for all intents and purposes it is not there as far as a regular user is concerned. If it helps, imagine a Cessna pilot who's suddenly asked to fly a big intercontinental aircraft without any of the assistance features turned on. All the controls are there, but as far as the Cessna pilot is concerned, they can't fly it.

[ncann]

Billing limits, as in, a hard limit over which resources will shut down and I can be sure I won't be charged over that limit? I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist.

[chris37879]

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

You have to configure (correctly) an AWS IAM account with permissions to run actions you have to specify when budget amounts are hit. There's no simple 'Do not spend more than $X per month' setting. You have to understand AWS's auth and roles to set a limit using an action.

[heavyset_go]

Monitoring, alerts etc are not the same thing as being able to put a cap on the amount of money Amazon can charge your account for services per billing period.

[post-it]

AWS does not have billing limits.

[EricE]

You can budget but Amazon will NOT cut you off if you go over the budget.

At best you might get some alerts in a timely manner. Good luck.

[Andrew_nenakhov]

How hard? Bees against honey hard.

[whalesalad]

The disk you attach to an instance is not free, and capacity/performance characteristics dictate price.

[bstar77]

It's possible that was the issue, but I estimated a 20gb storage partition. Maybe usage was to blame, I know the server was inefficient with reads and writes.

[kondro]

But what did you actually assign? EBS volumes are priced based on provisioned capacity (including throughput if you choose io2 volumes).

[bstar77]

I just don't remember the details. As I said earlier, it's likely I made a mistake, but the process was not clear and I was not notified when my instance expense ballooned to something I clearly wasn't expecting. I never had these kinds of issues with Heroku, Linode or any other host.

[jsemrau]

A fellow Linode aficionado!

I had a similar experience as you. You are getting lured in by the free tier, but then this paid additional service is needed and that paid on top. Didn't work for me at all.

[bradknowles]

With AWS, you can set up billing rules to notify you of any charges over any limit you want, and you can break that down by service or overall charges, etc…. You learn a lot about this process when you become an AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner.

Sadly, they don’t turn these things on by default. You have to know about them in advance, and you have to know how to configure them. That’s one thing I wish they would improve.

[qwertyuiop_]

There goes a call for thousands of MBA hacks to slither into this mess and create more mess and call it "value creation"

[nix23]

Just try Oracle Cloud believe me...it's so much better.

[danielheath]

It’s not any more straightforward to use IME, and I have had an instance vanish without a trace in the past 4 months.

It is, however, far cheaper and has more transparent pricing.

[nix23]

> It’s not any more straightforward to use IME, and I have had an instance vanish without a trace in the past 4 months.

It's called administrating on whisky ;)