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

It's not just AWS. I think there are only two types of cloud providers: The ones like AWS and DigitalOcean that shift the risk to the customer and the ones that offer shady "unlimited" and "unmetered" plans.

Neither is what I want. I wish there was a provider with clear and documented limits to allow proper capacity planning while at the same time shifting all the availability risk to the customer but taking on the financial risk. I'd be willing to pay a higher fixed price for that, as long as it is not excessive.

Bare metal server with unmetered bandwidth.

Indeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference :

https://baremetalsavings.com

It seems that automatic billing is something that cloud providers invented. For example, home Internet providers or mobile providers usually use prepaid plans, where they simply stop the service once you ran out of money (but you can connect your card account if you trust them). So you cannot get charged arbitrary amount for home Internet, and for mobile unless you travel.

If anything this makes me feel better since my workload doesn’t require very beefy machines and the amount id be saving is basically irrelevant compared to my labor costs.

I guess you'd want Hetzner. You get a generous amount per server and then a reasonable price for each additional TB.

This is really nice, thank you!

Love the tool and UI you built. I homelab and while not always on 24/7 its way more affordable to run on my own bare metal than pay a cloud provider. I also get super fast local speeds.

> I homelab

Didn't know there was a verb for it! I "homelab" too and so far am very happy. With a (free) CDN in front of it it can handle spikes in traffic (that are rare anyways), and everything is simple and mostly free (since the machines are already there).

Is that true? All of my Internet and mobile telephone service is post-paid with automatic billing. I know one can get prepaid plans from some providers, but how are you arriving at "usually"?

Yes, bare metal is not a panacea. Some use cases require 0 personnel change going bare metal (even having reduced labor), and some are very much the opposite.

It means in your country people trust companies more than in mine. We use pre-paid system and optionally you can connect a card account for automatic billing (but the company cannot charge a card if there is no money left).

Landline phone companies were always usage-based billing where you could run up huge bills by, say, making an international phone call for an hour.

I rent a moderate sized Hetner box running FreeBSD and just spin up a jail (zfs helps here) or if necessary a bhyve VM per 'thing.'

I'd fire a box up at home instead but at ~£35/mo I can never quite find the motivation compared to spending the time hacking on one of my actual projects instead.

(I do suspect if I ever -did- find the motivation I'd wonder why I hadn't done so sooner; so it goes)

I don't think DigitalOcean shifts risk to the customer. They have "pre-paid" cloud VPS plans of 5/10 USD per month with hard-limits right?

> It's not just AWS. I think there are only two types of cloud providers: The ones like AWS and DigitalOcean that shift the risk to the customer and the ones that offer shady "unlimited" and "unmetered" plans.

Actually there is a third category, those who care. I will grant you it is a rare category but it is there.

One example name: Exoscale[1]

Swiss cloud provider, they offer:

    (a) hard spend limits via account pre-pay balances (or you can also have post-pay if you want the "usual" cloud  "surprises included" payment model).
    (b) good customer service that doesn't hide behind "community forums"

Sure they don't offer all the bells and whisles range of services of the big names, but what they do do, they do well.

No I am not an Exoscale shill, and no I don't work for Exoscale. I just know some of their happy customers. :)

[1]https://www.exoscale.com/

Vultr has hard limits by default.

Hetzner also for CPU use, and last time I checked the traffic would drop to slower bandwidth if you pass some limit. I think they still charge you, though.

> So you cannot get charged arbitrary amount for home Internet

Comcast (mostly) disagrees, you have a 1.2 TB data cap and "After that, blocks of 50 GB will automatically be added to your account for an additional fee of $10 each plus tax." They do have a limit of $100 on these charges per month at least.

Yep. In 1995 my parents bought me my first PC after years of begging. We lived in a very rural area with no local dial-up provider. I eventually was able to connect and was having a blast on message boards until my parents got a $350 phone bill, which is $750 in 2024 dollars. Turns out I had been using a long-distance number.