I Followed the Official AWS Amplify Guide and Was Charged $1,100

This seems like a glaring bug in the scripts run by that `npx` command. The author is correct, the scripts should 100%:

- Choose the lowest cost resource (it's a tutorial!)

- Cleanup resources when the `delete` subscript is run

I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources after running something like this.

If a startup had this behavior would you shrug and say "this happens, you just have to be paranoid"? Why is AWS held to a different standard by some?

AWS docs are terrible. Half the time their code examples are flat out wrong.

Is there even a simple way of listing all the existing resources in an AWS account? I’ve always had to check service by service, region by region. It’s tedious and error-prone.

> do paranoid sweeps of their entire AWS account looking for rogue resources

That's the thing that annoys me the most about AWS. There's no easy way to find out all the resources I'm currently paying for (or if there's a way, I couldn't find it).

Without an easy to understand overview, it feels like I don't have full control of my own account.

Yes i was charged $400 once for services i had running for three months without any idea it was happening

The billing department knows exactly what you were running, but they only tell you once a month...

You can set up daily or hourly cost and usage reports on the account. I built a finops function based on it, feeding the data into a Postgres db. Make sure to select incremental updates, if not you’ll en up paying for tb of s3 storage.

I thought the tag editor was where one could get a comprehensive inventory of account resources? (Unable to check as I don't currently have easy access to the AWS console)

Cost and usage reports will show you what is being paid for. Then there are resources that won’t show up on that so I have used aws:config to pull down other resource lists and finally you can cross both reports to more less find everything.

Yea it’s ok for that but won’t list everything. Example: ec2 snapshots won’t show up in the aws:config report but you will be charged for it, so Cost and Usage reports will show you what you will be charged for.

They tell you in hourly increments for almost everything?

I'd like to immortalise this comment because it's exactly the kind of thing that annoys me when people say "cloud is easier" or that it requires fewer skills/people/resources.

It clearly does, it's just different skills/time/energy requirements compared to colocation.

The people who write these tutes have (I imagine) an unlimited budget with some special account which maybe leads to this situation

Sooooo, if a scripts asks you to run it as root, you just trust it and don't check what it does before?

TB of S3 storage is surprisingly inexpensive though. Especially compared to everything else AWS.

My first line of research when I have to use something new is: Can I get a fixed bill every month? What happens if I use more than that, can I limit surprises? If not, I will find something else. We are also very careful with building us into "free" google services after the map surprise a few years ago. That cost us a lot of money in the end.

We were billed about $5000 per month by Google even though we had asked what the billing change would mean for us and they said you will be inside the free limits. Turns out we weren't.

And are experienced developers, who don't make costly mistakes, because they just follow their tried & tested routines.

this is one of the things i love about azure, easily being able to see everything.

closest i found in aws was something like tag manager?

> There's no easy way to find out all the resources I'm currently paying for (or if there's a way, I couldn't find it

Cost Explorer, in the management account if you’ve got Organization set up.

> This seems like a glaring bug

Amazon earns an easy $1000, it is not a bug but a feature. Even if they think that it is a bug it is going to be pretty low compared to anything else that hits THEIR bottom line.

> I don't think it's fair to expect developers to do paranoid sweeps ...

Agree, it isn't fair. I think it's sensible though. When creating anything on AWS I always behave like AWS is an hostile financial institution gone rogue.

Also when you do these lessons with an in-person AWS trainer, they give you a specific unlimited training account that gets destroyed when the course ends.

What about the billing dashboard? You can break it down by service and say CPU or memory, or tags if you use them. That has always given me good enough insight into where my client's money is being spent. I'm not sure it's totally realtime, but certainly daily.

BTW I'm a supporter of spending caps, not saying this should be the only way.

Every so often, I'd get a random bill from AWS totaling to a few cents. No idea where it comes from and it's not worth the non trivial effort to find out about it. Just another reason I avoid AWS unless necessary.

Even hourly isn't good enough. If I shut down some service, I want to know right now that nothing billable is left over. I don't want to have to wait an hour and come back and check only to find I forgot to clean up some IP address.

Why can we not have a "billable items" dashboard which simply shows, globally, a list of all items in your account which are billable, and how much they will cost if left running for 1 more hour/month?

Same here. And I'm worried that one month that bill will suddenly be $20k because whatever was costing a few cents suddenly gets hit by some DDoS attack.

Or that my card will expire and AWS will send that $0.03 bill to collections and slap court fees on and send a bailiff.

Their whole setup seems intended to cause expensive mistakes.

There is, its called the Cost Explorer.

"daily or hourly" isn't enough though.

There's some AWS resources, like for example route53 hosted zones, which bill only once at the end of the month, and so a daily or hourly bill won't tell you anything about leaked resources there.

There's at least a one resource that only bills once a year, so yet again you won't catch those with even monthly usage reports.

Cost and Usage reports tells you what services you are paying for and which regions they are in, but doesn't give you a list of resources themselves.

$283/TB-year doesnt strike me as inexpensive. And that price does not include any data transfer.