> AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap. The purpose of this post is to shed some light on this.
Or it's a UX gap. If this is such a common complaint that's causing meaningful reputation damage, surely there'd be a better way to communicate this in the product? I think it's fair to assume that there's less interest in building features that encourage users to spend less money.
Agreed. AWS is downright hostile about giving you any idea about what resources you actually have deployed, to the point where it must be deliberately malicious. Even their billing page is terrible for tracing down the root cause of usage with the default configuration.
You have to go into third party tooling if you want any chance of seeing what’s actually going on, especially if there’s any odds of you deploying stuff in another region and even moreso if you have more than 1 account.
At this point, I’d say it should be a best practice of owning 2 AWS accounts, even as a hobbyist: one payer account with a HEAVILY locked down SCP and then a child account with the stuff you’re deploying.
Or they're charging people in at-best mysterious if not outright duplicitous/malicious ways because it makes them money without having to do anything (save for send a bill and have the right fine print in the right places. )
It's no accident, it's not just "bad UX", it's deliberate.
> AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap.
Observe the mental gymnastics to explain away "mysterious ways" by making it the users fault and calling them - *checks notes* - stupid, for not knowing something AWS is very intentionally keen on you not knowing.
I sure hope OP was getting payed for this AWS ad, imagine shilling for a multi-billion dollar company for free.
It's the UX, deliberately omitting information or not. There at least used to be some toggles for example without any indication that they mean anything other than a minor load balancer configuration change, but caused I think $200 month bill addition. No indication at all that they have a meaningful monetary impact.
Or it's a UX gap. If this is such a common complaint that's causing meaningful reputation damage, surely there'd be a better way to communicate this in the product? I think it's fair to assume that there's less interest in building features that encourage users to spend less money.