[esrauch]

Except if you go on vacation to unplug for a week and had some bug or misconfiguration couldn't you easily run up a bill in the hundreds or thousands when you expect it to be in the tens?

If this is so implausible then why can't they provide a cap? It feels to me that they are purposefully trying to capitalize on people's mistakes. Call me paranoid but it is honestly the primary reason why I've been wary to play with AWS.

[ryanbales]

Most sites with the kind of traffic that could potentially run up the bill thousands of dollars will have checks in place to ensure a mistake like that wouldn't happen. Anything else would be irresponsible.. I'd challenge your assumption that Amazon is intentionally trying capitalize on mistakes... A company a big as Amazon doesn't have the time or need to even consider something like that.. And yes, I think you're being paranoid.

[esrauch]

A spending control is such an obvious feature, and wouldn't exactly be difficult for them to implement. For some toy project it doesn't have to be thousands of dollars for this to be an annoyance to me, I have no desire to get a surprise bill of $200 at the end of a month even though I can easily afford it.

Doesn't it seem bizarre to give your credit card number over and agree to pay some undisclosed sum with no cap? If it's my money and I'm paying for some nonessential service, I expect to never be surprised at how much I'm charged, even if its $10 when I expected $2.

> I'd challenge your assumption that Amazon is intentionally trying capitalize on mistakes

I actually worked at Amazon (not on AWS) and I've worked at a few other BigCo's and you might be surprised by how many things exactly like this they do have the time and desire to worry about. You have it backwards; for a company as big as Amazon it's worth paying an entire salary just to worry about things like this, since a fraction of a percent of increased AWS income will more than pay for itself. It's extremely likely they are at least trying to capitalize on people who sign up for the free tier and accidentally go over their limit, or else they would have a "trial" mode that only confirms your credit card and won't ever charge it without your approval.

[ceejayoz]

> Most sites with the kind of traffic that could potentially run up the bill thousands of dollars will have checks in place to ensure a mistake like that wouldn't happen.

One thing that'd help dramatically would be exposing the various account activity and cost data via API. There's currently no API for accessing one's monthly spend to-date.

From a comment elsewhere, looks like they're sorta working on it, finally (CloudWatch metric).

[ez77]

I don't think Amazon is being dishonest, but you can see that, regardless the individual degree of paranoia, there are quite a few small developers who don't try AWS just to be safe.

My point is that it makes business sense for Amazon to lure this old-fashioned crowd, and it could do so by implementing a simple feauture such as spending control.