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

"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.

Dear Customer,

You have reached your Configured Maximum Monthly Spend Limit.

As per your settings we have removed all objects from S3, All RDS Databases, All Route53 Domains, all ESB volumes, all elastic IPs, All EC2 instances and all Snapshots.

Please update your spend limit before you recreate the above.

Yours, AWS

A compromise solution to this could be to block creation of new resources if their monthly cost would exceed the monthly limit, unless the customer increases the limit.

It wouldn’t solve the problem for usage-based billing, but it would have solved the problem here.

All sorts of problems there. It means that you can't spin up a stack for an hour if the system calculates that leaving it online for a whole month would breach your limit. If the original author had a $100/month limit he wouldn't have been able to spin up the stack even once.

Also you have variable costs (like s3 traffic) that could put you over your limit half way through the month. Then how does AWS stop you breaching your limit?

On a more practical level I don't think AWS keeps tracks of bills on a minute-by-minute basis.