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.

> It's also a large barrier to adoption.

e.g. for me. I never dared to get my foot wet with AWS, despite interest. Better safe with a cheap, flat-rate VPS than sorry.

I've also shot myself in the foot with various APIs, e.g. I racked a 3k bill in a month with Google APIs for my side project, just because I wasn't checking the usage, I didn't think I was using that much. This is more of my fault I guess, but luckily support waived that fee for me after some back and forth. Also I'm not from the US so this bill is larger for me compared to US folks. But honestly also Google APIs are pretty expensive. For hosting my side projects I use a single dedicated DO droplet for $320 a month, where I have 40+ docker containers.

That’s still very expensive. At that point you’d be well served by going dedicated hardware.

The droplet I have is 32 GB ram, 160 GB disk, 16 vCPUs (dedicated CPU, Regular Intel).

What would you suggest me instead?

I see Hetzner and maybe OVH could cost significantly less.

Actually looks like with Hetzner I would get better specs at 115 eur per month. With 16 vCP, 64GB ram, 360 GB SSD.

That's crazy, I didn't realize there's such a huge difference.

I think your comment is actually impressively valuable to me...

I'm going to bring it all over during the weekend. That's really exciting to find out much cheaper prices, because I've had disk space running out constantly on my DO. I do all my docker builds, files, databases and everything there as well. And for side projects I usually value all the cache and development speed as opposed to trying to optimize everything to take min performance and storage.

Also I spend way too much on Supabase. I think also $300+/month and increasing, I will bring that over and self host with a large SSD. I think at this point I prefer self hosting a postgres anyway to Supabase. I just tried it for a while, but the costs started going up.

Thank you so much.

Edit: there's some limits in Hetzner initially, so it might take few months before I can actually migrate.

Also be aware it's not all roses with Hetzner.

There are stories online of folks getting their accounts deactivated or not even getting approved.

https://x.com/theo/status/1827480999305118135

https://x.com/heyandras/status/1856747621962191126