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

It's a Tim foil hat pet conspiracy that I have, but I strongly believe that part important of the business model (or revenue share) is from people making mistakes or forgetting resources; more or less like gym subscriptions where the gym owners are more than happy to sell the [maximum_amount_of _people + 40%] knowing that the absenteeism will give the revenue offset that sustain part of the business.

There's certainly wastage in large organisations. Over provisioning or keeping that huge S3 bucket full of data from some long forgotten project.

I suspect a lot of the huge AWS customers just eat this because it's so hard to mitigate.

If a business has hundreds of AWS accounts it becomes very hard to track, and if each account can only shave a few hundred dollars a month off their individual bill then there's very little impetus to actually do the work for the individual teams. Despite that possibly adding up substantial savings for the overall business.

My team was migrating from one cloud provider to another and I was tasked to go through the soon to be deleted accounts in the old provider and delete resources that we were absolutely sure were serving no purpose whatsoever. You'd wonder why this wasn't something done on the regular.

Ended up saving at least $4000 dollars a month. And this was mostly sandbox environments that people forgot about.

I can well believe it, I know in my own team's account I can save hundreds a month and multiple thousands a year.

I keep raising this but it's never prioritized as it means taking my time from developing our products

Essentially my manager then loses dev time to reduce a bill that due to institutional accounting practices they never actually see!

I believe you are right, but no tin foil hat theory needed just sound pricing strategy. Eg. factor in underutilization but also refunds. For a flat rate, a price point at 70% of total value of included volume still is better bottom line if you set included volume high enough that the average usage is 50%, yet it still feels more generous and less risky from customer point of view. OTOH very granular unit pricing lets everyone underestimate total costs and complicates comparison with competing offers, „bread and butter“ product prices mask more uncommon ones, etc. In IT underutilization is high, also on own infra, that’s something cloud vendors (and hardware and software vendors) can rely on. Paying for it at least incentivizes to improve utilization, autoscaling is better, sometimes the cloud vendor does it for you, sometimes you have to donitnyourself. In IT laziness is rampant, time is often seen as more valuable than cash out. Also someting the vendors can rely on. I‘ve seen a howto for Azure for a scalable LLM API Gateway. It cost me almost 2 hours to get an estimate for min costs - with default values it would have cost almost 10k per month, I could size it down to less than 1k. A simple loadbalanced reverse proxy on vms cost less than 400. Be especially cautious when everyone is in a hurry. The pre-made solutions may try to cash in on that. Over all: Pricing and pricing models are part of the product properties you buy, and looking for and dealing with psychological pricing strategies and tactics is part of doing business.