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

(elliott-king.github.io)
461 points thunderbong | 2 comments | 14 Nov 24 06:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.423s | source
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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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soup10 ◴[14 Nov 24 09:10 UTC] No.42134375[source]▶
Spend limits are such an obvious and necessary feature that the only reason they don't have them is shady business practices.
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lukeramsden ◴[14 Nov 24 09:32 UTC] No.42134483[source]▶
Not really. Do you think that this is trivial at AWS scale? What do you do when people hit their hard spend limits, start shutting down their EC2 instances and deleting their data? I can see the argument that just because its "hard" doesn't mean they shouldn't do it, but it's disingenuous to say they're shady because they don't.
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1. benterix ◴[14 Nov 24 10:51 UTC] No.42134961[source]▶
People kept up bringing this argument since the very beginning when people already asked for this feature. This used to be the most upvoted request on AWS forums with AWS officially acknowledging (back in 2007 IIRC), "We know it's important for you and are working on it". But they made a decision not to implement it.

The details don't matter, really. For those who decide to set up a hard cap and agree to its terms, there could be a grace period or not. In the end, all instances would be shut down and all data lost, just like in traditional services when you haven't paid your bill so you are no longer entitled to them, pure and simple.

They haven't implemented and never will because Amazon is a company that is obsessed with optimization. There is negative motivation to implement anything related to that.

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2. Aeolun ◴[14 Nov 24 11:01 UTC] No.42135034[source]▶
That, and AWS just doesn’t really care for people with a spending limit as their customers, which is entirely reasonable.

Just forgiving all the ridiculous bills is a much better (and cheaper) strategy.