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Everett Berry

Tell me your surprise AWS bill story

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At a previous AI company we spent $80K in 2 weeks because we left some large GPUs (p2s I think it was) on. We had $50K of credits leading into that month so we spent through all those and owed AWS $30K in hard cash :(

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Mike Young
I was getting billed $50/month for almost 2 years for a side project I had previously shut off. I had a gmail account that had long-since been deactivated that was tied to that AWS account, so I couldn't log in. Support was pretty useless - ended up having to cancel the credit card.
Jack Hammons
It can be really tough to find and configure all the AWS services that I’m paying for. I see on the billing page that I’m being charged but finding the service specific console to turn something off can be complicated. Ex. Spinning up an EC2 instance also creates network resources by default that can’t be shut down from the EC2 console.
Paul VanZandt
This is really unfortunate - there should be more measures in place to avoid pitfalls like this!
Ivan Ralic
I honestly do not understand why people still use AWS. They literally have the same immoral UX business practices Amazon has, aimed at making you lose money. Stop blaming yourself and your sysadmin/devops guys, AWS is intentionally bad. Just go to any other Cloud provider and you'll be fine. I hate them from the bottom of my heart 😅 Instead of bad stories here are some good providers: ➜ Azure ➜ Google Cloud ➜ Digital Ocean Azure has everything AWS has just better and cheaper. If you are a startup there are even more free credits available.
Ivan Ralic
@everett_berry for sure, I was most of my life in Enterprise SaaS that's probably why I tend to lean towards Azure 😄 When you say credits do you mean a free tier on GCP or are there any startup programs now to receive even more infrastructure? For example: ➜ Microsoft for Startups (up to 120k) ➜ Startup with IBM (up to 120k) ➜ AWS activate (up to 100k) ➜ DigitalOcean Hatch (I once received 3k, but I think you can get more)
grozza
That sounds just awful. How did you handle it? Actually, I've never had to deal with a problem like that. I was taught by my businessman father from a very young age that all bills also have to go through additional legal protection. Recently, I was buying a motorcycle and almost got caught up in a fraudulent scheme. The seller at the end of the transaction quoted twice the price. I was lucky enough to have a legally certified motorcycle bill of sale with me at the time. That's the story for you.