←back to thread

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

(elliott-king.github.io)
461 points thunderbong | 4 comments | 14 Nov 24 06:48 UTC | HN request time: 1.002s | source
Show context
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.

replies(20): >>42134131 #>>42134150 #>>42134268 #>>42134271 #>>42134282 #>>42134287 #>>42134291 #>>42134375 #>>42134462 #>>42134469 #>>42134517 #>>42134613 #>>42134695 #>>42134828 #>>42135170 #>>42135288 #>>42135373 #>>42135557 #>>42135706 #>>42136718 #
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.
replies(2): >>42134483 #>>42135346 #
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.
replies(9): >>42134529 #>>42134586 #>>42134724 #>>42134741 #>>42134961 #>>42135020 #>>42135028 #>>42135354 #>>42135796 #
1. Kwpolska ◴[14 Nov 24 11:00 UTC] No.42135020[source]▶
They've had two decades to figure it out. For EC2, they could shut down the instance but keep storage and public IPs. It shouldn't be too hard to estimate when the instance has to be stopped to end up with charges below the hard limit.
replies(1): >>42135661 #
2. cdchn ◴[14 Nov 24 12:43 UTC] No.42135661[source]▶
Now multiply the logic required by multiple cost factors across hundreds of services.
replies(1): >>42136425 #
3. lucianbr ◴[14 Nov 24 14:30 UTC] No.42136425[source]▶
Imagine how impossible it is to actually build those services, with all their logic, if just this added logic is impossible :)
replies(1): >>42138869 #
4. cdchn ◴[14 Nov 24 17:46 UTC] No.42138869{3}[source]▶
I didn't say it was impossible or even intractable. Its simply not as easy as everyone "why don't they justs."