Amazon Web Services--Beware of billing on "Free Tier"

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hankrausch

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GoodbyePOA
I found out the hard way that it is very easy to inadvertently create a service on AWS that will accrue significant charges, even under the "Free" tier. Logged in a single time to see how it worked & got a bill the next month. I would have expected some alert that I was going into the "pay" part of the service. I am sure some group of lawyers reviewed the terms of service and made sure they are indemnified, but it is certainly not the way I do business and it has left a bad taste in my mouth. As we all know in aviation, there is a wide gulf between "legal" and "safe" sometimes and here there is a huge gulf between "legal" and "ethical".
 
It certainly can catch you by surprise if you don't crunch the numbers up-front.

Rich
 
Thanks in my case I didn't know what numbers to crunch-- I set up a website to see how it was done and logged out, I did not know what the data limit was but I wasn't worried as it had no traffic to it and was not advertised--well they do not bill by traffic but by time, and the number of hours in the free tier is less than the number of hours in a month, so if you set up a "no traffic" website and let it run, you get a bill at the end of the month. As I said seems like a setup to me but I suppose legal.
 
Aws really requires you understand it well to use it effectively. It's complicated technology that can get very deep and cost you a lot of money if you don't understand it. There are lots of features to help you track cost or even alert you if cost is approaching a certain threshold .

It sounds like you launched the wrong thing. What did you launch?

The free tier includes 750 hours per month of t2.micro use. There is no month in a year with more than 750 hours. So the reason you're describing is wrong and is not the reason you were charged.

Aws bills by time, bandwidth, and lots of factors. However, properly used, it's pretty damn hard to beat their price in most small business and enterprise settings. Although the reason most folks use AWS really isn't because of the price, it's because of the flexibility. That flexibility lets you get more done in less time with less labor.

You'd probably be better off to use their lightsail offering if you're not willing to really learn aws. It's meant for simpler use cases, like the one you described.

https://amazonlightsail.com/
 
Maybe there were license fees involved for the OS and/or other software (CloudLinux, cPanel, anything by MS, etc.). Those can add up pretty quickly.

Rich
 
Someone should put together a class action lawsuit!
 
The support Amazon offers on the free tier is awful. So is the quality of uptime based on my experience. But you get what you pay for I guess.
 
Ditto to everything Jesse said.

Also, Amazon is up front about pricing for all of their services. A quick Google search will take you right to the page where pricing is explained for whatever service offering you are thinking of using. You can also set up a very quick budget/billing alert to notify you when a specified threshold is reached.

We are heavy users of various AWS offerings where I work and for some of the services, I have quite a lot of usage but have yet to ever crack the free tier barrier and be charged anything. (Things like Lambda, SNS, and so on).
 
jesse said:
However, properly used, it's pretty damn hard to beat their price in most small business and enterprise settings.
Click to expand...

Small Businesses yes, but for medium businesses, the AWS egress costs are deadly, and it doesn't get any better until you're the size of Netflix again.
 
Just out of curiosity I took a look at it and the 750 hours of free service are there but there is some type of on-demand charge for the OS that does not fall in the 750 hours, this bills in parallel with the free tier:

upload_2017-3-13_16-50-22.png

And yes I was expecting to be told I should have known,researched more etcetera. I have never met an enlisted man who did not have a story about how he saved the bacon of some "stoopid officer" and I have never met a tech who did not first let me know how superior his skills/knowledge were. And after that they help you out. Thanks!
 
I must confess, when you said "significant charges" in your original post, I was assuming you meant somewhat more than $3.23...

Rich
 
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