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.

Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers, who are the core customer of AWS. Almost no level of accidental spend is worth creating downtime or data loss in a critical application.

Even having the option of a hard spend limit would be hazardous, because accounting teams might push the use of such tools, and thereby risk data loss incidents when problems happen.

Hard spend limits might make sense for indie / SME focused cloud vendors though.

So have a “Starter” account with spend limits then, don’t understand how an individual is supposed to learn this stack and actually sleep at night without waking up panicking something has been left running.

By checking what resources you are spinning up and double checking everything has been removed after you're done. I have used AWS for small projects many times and have never been hit with a surprise bill. The platform is built for actual customers, not your hello world app.

Being aware of everything you're running on AWS is trivial when it's all on the EC2 dashboard, and you create everything by hand or using Terraform.

Many of these new AWS-provided stacks, however, seem to create stuff all over your account.

The moral of the story? Don't ever use AWS tools like the one the OP describes, ones which create a bunch of different resources for you automatically.