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

(elliott-king.github.io)
461 points thunderbong | 3 comments | 14 Nov 24 06:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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forgotoldacc ◴[14 Nov 24 07:48 UTC] No.42133949[source]▶
I've been putting off digging into AWS for years now, and it's because of stories like these. There really should be a standardized training course that requires no credit card info and lets people experiment for free.

Instead they have some pencil pushers calculating that they can milk thousands here and there from "user mistakes" that can't be easily disputed, if at all. I'm sure I'm not the only person who's been deterred from their environment due to the rational fear of waking up to massive charges.

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etothepii ◴[14 Nov 24 07:53 UTC] No.42133979[source]▶
It is very unusual for AWS not to issue refunds in situations like this, so I don't think it's a function of them finding an edge to milk thousands from user mistakes. More likely they've found that issuing refunds is less onerous than it would be to provide accurate and cheap tutorials.

Perhaps that does not excuse the behaviour but AWS reversed a $600 charge I incurred using AWS Textract where the charges were completely legitimate and I was working for a billion dollar enterprise.

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gwd ◴[14 Nov 24 08:19 UTC] No.42134132[source]▶
> It is very unusual for AWS not to issue refunds in situations like this

...when asked to. But what percentage of mistakes like this end up just being "eaten" by the end-user, not realizing that they can ask for a refund? What percentage don't even get noticed?

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vbezhenar ◴[14 Nov 24 08:42 UTC] No.42134241[source]▶
I encountered similar situation twice and AWS did not issue a refund both times. I'm avoiding AWS like plague now. Not going to rely on goodwill of support person handling my ticket today.
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1. HumanOstrich ◴[14 Nov 24 09:58 UTC] No.42134632{3}[source]▶
Care to share any details?
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2. vbezhenar ◴[14 Nov 24 10:26 UTC] No.42134798[source]▶
First time I've used S3 glacier in a wrong way and downloading few gigabytes resulted in multi-hundred dollars bill. I don't remember all the details, but it was absolutely non-obvious behaviour. I think it was corrected since then and today it wouldn't work like that.

Second time I've configured virtual machine with some fancy disk. It was supposed to work as CI build server, so I've chosen the fastest disk. Apparently this fastest disk was billed by IOPS or something like that, so it ate few thousands of dollars in a month. I couldn't even imagine disk could cost that much.

Basically these pricing nuances contradicted everything I ever encountered on multiple hosters I worked with and it felt like malicious traps designed specifically for people to fall into.

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3. HumanOstrich ◴[14 Nov 24 11:42 UTC] No.42135264[source]▶
Dang, they got you a few times. Those are all things I could've been bitten by.

They used to be better about refunding accidental or misunderstood charges. I had a couple winners a long time ago like a $600 bill for a giant EC2 instance I meant to stop. They refunded it quickly, no questions. The last time I needed to refund some accidental charges though, there was a lot more stalling and forms.

You know what's insane? RDS (database) instances can be stopped, but automatically restart themselves after 7 days. Didn't read the fine print and thought you could spin up a giant DB for as-needed usage? There's a thousand bucks a month.