[lapcat]

AWS is full of dark patterns. You can sign up for the so-called "free" tier and then too easily, unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it (by getting a bill at the end of the month), even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around. AWS doesn't give any warning to free tier members that a configuration change is going to cost you, and their terms are also very confusing. For example, PostgreSQL is advertised as free, but "Aurora PostgreSQL" is quite costly.

[akira2501]

> unwittingly enable something that suddenly charges you hundreds of dollars before you know it

The default is to have current and estimated monthly cost displayed on your root console as soon as you login. You will also get email alerts when you hit 50% and then 80% of your "free tier quota" in a month.

> even if you're not doing anything with the service except looking around.

I'm not aware of any services which will cost you money unless you actively enable them and create an object within it's class. Many services, such as S3, will attempt to force you into a "secured" configuration that avoids common traps by default.

> For example, PostgreSQL is advertised as free, but "Aurora PostgreSQL" is quite costly.

There's a rubric to the way AWS talks about it's internal services that is somewhat impenetrable at first. It's not too hard to figure out, though, if you take the time to read through their rather large set of documentation. That's the real price you must pay to successfully use the "free tier."

Anyways.. PostgreSQL is an open source project. Amazon RDS is a managed service that can run instances of it. Amazon Aurora is a different service that provides it's own engine that is _compatible_ with MySQL and PostgreSQL.

To know why you'd use one or the other, the shibboleth is "FAQ," so search for "AWS Aurora FAQ" and carefully read the whole page before you enable the service.

[simonw]

"It's not too hard to figure out, though, if you take the time to read through their rather large set of documentation"

I don't even know where I would start with that. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/ lists documentation for 305 different products!

[deanCommie]

Well, presumably, from the service you decided to use first?

[_adamb]

We have a slack channel, #aws-budget-alerts, where AWS sends a notification any time our forecasted spend reaches certain milestones or the actual spend reaches certain milestones.

It's a really easy to set up app!

[sierra1011]

Ooh, that sounds nice. Beats my current slew of emails around week 3 of the month. Got a link to any docs to get set up quickly?

[ranger_danger]

> AWS doesn't give any warning

It does if you ask it to. You can get billing alerts if current costs are projected to go over a threshold.

[hughesjj]

You have to manually set this up though.

There's so much UX for a prospective new AWS dev that could be improved. Say a 1 click "do you want billing alerts with that?" Template, or a "do you want to lock down expensive nonfree stuff?" option to set some soft limits to zero out of the gate (nescessitating a self serve support case to unblock).

It's frustrating. It's been this way for over a decade yet you'll still see new customers cutting themselves on the nuances of free tier. I get that AWS is 'enterprise real deal do what I say', but I don't think that means you should completely exclude the customer story of any new developers just getting their feet wet. It's an area of customer obsession the business has regrettably lacked, and if you go by the continuous stories of people messing it up on HN/twitter/reddit/etc, it only becomes more glaring how little the new guys are being taken care of.

[OptionOfT]

But it's kinda the same as a trial where you have to put in a credit card number.

If they auto-charge once the trial is over, I don't like them. That is a dark pattern.

Equally, with this, AWS could very well ask you, the user, what you'd like to do if you surpass the free tier. Charge? Or turn it all off.

On top of that they could instate default thresholds so that you, the person who just started their free trial, does not get bill shock when you forget to turn of that $200/h machine.

[paulddraper]

Almost all trials tell you how much they'll charge you.

[lapcat]

My threshold is $0. I was never expecting to get billed on the free tier.

[alanfranz]

Most cloud providers work this way somehow. Flexible, pay as you go infra doesn’t cope well with fixed pricing.

Fixed price cloud offerings exist for some services, but can end up with an apparently larger sticker price.