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

(elliott-king.github.io)
461 points thunderbong | 8 comments | 14 Nov 24 06:48 UTC | HN request time: 1.26s | source | bottom
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modernerd ◴[14 Nov 24 08:08 UTC] No.42134059[source]▶
"Billing alerts" are a joke, give us hard spend limits. Then offer a way to set those limits during onboarding.

Building a business on blank cheques and accidental spends is shady. It's also a large barrier to adoption. The more times devs see reports like, "I tried [random 20-minute tutorial] and woke up to a bill for my life's savings and luckily support waived the fee this one time but next time they're coming for my house", the less they'll want to explore your offerings.

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weinzierl ◴[14 Nov 24 08:52 UTC] No.42134291[source]▶
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.

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1. devoutsalsa ◴[14 Nov 24 09:04 UTC] No.42134345[source]▶
Bare metal server with unmetered bandwidth.
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2. _bare_metal ◴[14 Nov 24 09:15 UTC] No.42134399[source]▶
Indeed. Shameless plug of a toy I built that lets you see the price difference :

https://baremetalsavings.com

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3. presentation ◴[14 Nov 24 09:42 UTC] No.42134536[source]▶
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.
replies(1): >>42134756 #
4. user432678 ◴[14 Nov 24 09:44 UTC] No.42134551[source]▶
This is really nice, thank you!
5. tonetegeatinst ◴[14 Nov 24 09:48 UTC] No.42134568[source]▶
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.
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6. bambax ◴[14 Nov 24 09:55 UTC] No.42134612{3}[source]▶
> 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).

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7. _bare_metal ◴[14 Nov 24 10:19 UTC] No.42134756{3}[source]▶
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.
8. mst ◴[14 Nov 24 11:43 UTC] No.42135271{4}[source]▶
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)