One of the many problems with AWS free tier is the obfuscation of expenditure by design. This is NOT OK.

Link to an article I found on hacker news - https://cloudirregular.substack.com/...

I was charged 9 bucks this month and all I did was host a simple application to learn spring framework. This isn’t nearly as bad as 200 bucks but still, i have no idea why i was charged anything at all for a dumb app. I’m leaving AWS before it sucks more blood from me, glad you posted this. Fucking crooks, I’m moving to a better cloud ide that won’t rob me of my money

@AtuM if not much needs to happen to charge nine bucks, I’m out!

The exact reason I am not using that horrendous piece of shit is because those hidden charges that are hard to pinpoint if you used 3 services just to try something. Amazon is known for their dark patterns.

If it needs cc details for a trial, they can just fuck off!

While I don't use GCP for other reasons, this is one area where they're superior. They don't let you run any resources that aren't covered by the free tier until you enable billing for the account.

Also apparently Amazon charges for allocation as well, not just retaining resources. I had a surprise £17 bill this month and as far as I can tell it was because I allocated 2 1TB SSD volumes before I figured out how the config works. I expect next month's bill to be around £4, which is the operating cost of an 1TB HDD.

Correction, I just checked my bill and calculated the price of the drive I did keep in the end, and Amazon did not in fact charge me for creating the drive.

@homo-lorens good for you!

@TeachMeCode

What do you expect the basic TEST/DEV environment cost ?
For the team of 4 developers, we are at 500$ / month. And that using as low tier as possible

@NoToJavaScript i don’t know, I’m a total noob to AWS. I went in blindly

@NoToJavaScript It makes sense to pay if you’re working on a product that is into production and generating revenue. Not so much if it is a college project used only by the dev.

@bizAnalyst In this case, local host is your friend and it’s free.

I don’t know for AWS, but with Azure you start paying the moment you need some data persistence. (Storage account, database, anything except file system).

@NoToJavaScript yes local host exists. But that’s the point here.

The real point is the AWS “Free tier” isn’t really free and I believe the obfuscation of expenditure is an intentional dark pattern. Do you concur?

@bizAnalyst

I would say YES.

It’s common to all cloud providers.

Up to like 6 months ago it was impossible in Azure to get the cost of any resource from bill without doing some research on resources ids.

And even now, it’s a bit better, but hey
“General purpose gen5 2 vCore database”. Which one? I have multiples.

They added this “functionality” in cost management part of Azure portal. It’s better, but STILL not on the bill.

Same for some apps. You want a free Azure function ? Guess what, it’s free only for irst XXX executions and you need a storage account. (Which is created by default when you add Azure function). And even better ! If you add a second function and don’t look closely when creating, a second storage account will be created

@bizAnalyst here, extract from actual Azure bill.

No mention of ids, no mention of name, no ressource group.

@NoToJavaScript That's really weird, mine definitely had either IDs or custom names.

A few weeks ago I was looking upon an account expense surge. Damn Route53 internal resolver just "being there" costs like 250 bucks.

Like.. it's a fucking (insert favorite DNS server here) process running. Da fuck is wrong with these people?

In my current company we're enforced to use only AWS services but in my previous one it was a lousy t3.nano ec2 running CoreDNS. Never gave a problem.