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

(elliott-king.github.io)
461 points thunderbong | 5 comments | 14 Nov 24 06:48 UTC | HN request time: 1.075s | 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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spacebanana7 ◴[14 Nov 24 10:10 UTC] No.42134695[source]▶
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.

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traceroute66 ◴[14 Nov 24 11:51 UTC] No.42135326[source]▶
> Hard spend limits are an anti-feature for enterprise customers

Yada yada yada, that's the same old excuse the cloud providers trot out.

Now, forgive me for my clearly Nobel Prize winning levels of intellect when I point out the following...

Number one: You would not have to turn on the hard spend limit if such functionality were to be provided.

Number two: You could enable customers to set up hard limits IN CONJUNCTION WITH alerts and soft limits, i.e. hitting the hard limit would be the last resort. A bit like trains hitting the buffers at a station ... that is preferable to killing people at the end of the platform. The same with hard spend limits, hitting the limit is better than waking up in the morning to a $1m cloud bill.

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1. Terretta ◴[14 Nov 24 13:31 UTC] No.42135986[source]▶
There's no way to implement a hard limit without getting in the middle of your system in ways that (a) alter the system design, (b) in ways you cannot correct for, and (c) not for the better.
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2. sigseg1v ◴[14 Nov 24 14:06 UTC] No.42136227[source]▶
In my experience every AWS service I've worked with has an API to destroy the resource, eg destroy RDS instance without backup, terminate EC2, etc. I want it to irrecoverably destroy everything in my account when it hits the limit, no questions asked.
3. fallingsquirrel ◴[14 Nov 24 14:07 UTC] No.42136233[source]▶
Of course there is. If someone hits their spending limit, asynchronously shut off the services (using the same API call that your customers can use, so no need to alter the system).

Then apply the hard limit in the billing code. If it took a minute or two to shut off all the instances, maybe the customer's bill should have been $1.001M instead of $1M, but cap the bill to $1M anyway. Given their profit margins of x,000% I think they can afford the lost pennies.

4. traceroute66 ◴[14 Nov 24 18:07 UTC] No.42139171[source]▶
> There's no way to implement a hard limit without ...

I don't believe that for a minute.

You know why ?

Let's turn it on its head. What happens if the credit card on your AWS account expires or is frozen ?

You think AWS are going to continue letting you rack up money with no card to charge against ?

I betcha they'll freeze your AWS assets the nanosecond they can't get a charge against the card.

The mechanism for customer-defined hard limits is basically no different.

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5. BoorishBears ◴[16 Nov 24 04:12 UTC] No.42154105[source]▶
From experience they will let you spend tens of thousands of dollars a month without a valid payment method.

Like many times more than you've ever even spent with them.

I mean it's like 6 months of that before you even get your first non-standard form email.