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 not just AWS. I think there are only two types of cloud providers: The ones like AWS and DigitalOcean that shift the risk to the customer and the ones that offer shady "unlimited" and "unmetered" plans.

Neither is what I want. I wish there was a provider with clear and documented limits to allow proper capacity planning while at the same time shifting all the availability risk to the customer but taking on the financial risk. I'd be willing to pay a higher fixed price for that, as long as it is not excessive.

It seems that automatic billing is something that cloud providers invented. For example, home Internet providers or mobile providers usually use prepaid plans, where they simply stop the service once you ran out of money (but you can connect your card account if you trust them). So you cannot get charged arbitrary amount for home Internet, and for mobile unless you travel.

Landline phone companies were always usage-based billing where you could run up huge bills by, say, making an international phone call for an hour.