I am so fucking frustrated about aws. Ive been following a course that covers aws and deployment using EBS EC2 ECS. I use a 12 months FREE Tier plan. I go to my billing and i see i got charged. What the FUCK? Is this not a fucking scam by AWS???? You tell me i can use your services for free and then without warning or confirmation im getting billed??? FOR WHAT???? Is there a way to cancel getting billed?

If a free service asks for your credit card details you know you get raped eventually

What @retoor said is u fortunatelly true.

Half of These services that ask for Credit card info first rely on you not reading all the conditions or forgetting to cancel and stuff like that.. It's scummy bur It's legal.

Im not sure how aws free tier works, but aws is all about "you pay for what you use"... So maybe you get a free instance, but not free storage space, or cpu or Network or whatever else there is. Check the receipt to know what you were billed for I guess

@Hazarth https://aws.amazon.com/free/ It's not rocket science. You get 30 GB of general purpose disk, one small or micro server instance (you can have more than one instance running at a time, but the total running time across all instances has to stay under 750 hours each month, which is roughly the same as having a single instance running the entire time), and 500 MB for your docker images for free for 12 months. Anything more and you have to pay for it.

The problem here is that mr. dumbfuck is an incompetent idiot who constantly blames others for their own failure.

@hitko I still think it's reasonable to expect something "free" to be 'free'. With extreme care I'm sure you can get away with paying nothing, but unless you take extreme care it's likely you'll be paying beyond-ludicrous AWS rates for things that come bundled for free with almost any low cost hosting package.

Virtual credit cards were made for these kind of scummy practices. Use them.

I used the free tier for 1 year and was charged 0 cents.
🤷‍♂️

In addition to what @hitko said, AWS does show you a pretty noticeable warning whenever you attempt to do something that is outside the free tier.

You also had the possibility to set a billing limit to $1, and any such attempt would have failed automatically, but yeah, I guess it's never your fault.

Here's what I've learnt from the big 3 over the years.

AWS: it's free, so long you stay within the "free" zone.

Azure: it's free to login, and we'll leave it at that,

Google: good fucking luck staying in the free zone, you want a service, sure... let me just turn that on for you, oh and you'll need this, this, this, oh this thing too, and yea this thing we won't tell you about, don't forgot to check your invoice later!

AWS can be free, and you can stay in its free tier, but it's restrictive and will rape you if you set a foot outside the line.

Always setup billing alerts, even if it's at $1.

The bill reporting is actually pretty great so just go to bills to see where you fucked up. If you fucked up big time like 100$+ you might contact support and beg for a reduction (and be kind to them), they are pretty coolant and will help you!

@hitko I mean yes, but I still think it's unreasonable to ask the customer for their credit card info before they even get to sample the service when it's said it's "free"...

When I see something that says it's free, and I press sign-in and the first thing they do is ask for my credit card details, I see that as a major red flag and I leave the service. Paying for a service automatically once the trial period ends shouldn't be a default "yes", there should always be roadblocks implemented when it comes to taking someones money. OP is a case in point, a good customer service should never get into a position where someone says "They took my money, and I'm not even sure why" whether they read the manual or not, that's just bad UX.

There's plenty of examples where we legally protect the customers from themselves, it's a valid UX and law model, aws just decided they don't care.

@Hazarth @spongegeoff That's like taking a car for a test drive, going over the speed limit, crashing it, and then refusing to pay because "it was a free test drive". The car dealership isn't giving you a "free car to test", and AWS isn't giving you a "free service to test". They're offering an expensive product that you can test for free as long as you stay within the specified limits, but you're still fully responsible if you go outside of those limits. Just because you don't have a physical product in front of you doesn't mean it should somehow work differently.

@nitnip where can i find some?

@C0D4 i have set up budget to cap at 1$. Is this correct and i wont get charged anything now?

@b2plane no, it's to notify you as to when to log in and shut down / destroy everything unless you plan on actually paying for it.

@C0D4 i did. Also closed my account. Contacted amazon support to open my account again and explained them the situation and asked if they could NOT charge me this time. They agreed.

Now im asking you is what do i do so in future i make sure i do NOT get charged anything in the first 12 months of FREE Tier?

For example if i ever use something that is not free i want aws to block me from using it -- not to allow me to use it and then charge me later! How do i do that?

@b2plane you don't.

You set up alerts for any service you enable, and you watch them carefully.

Check out https://aws.amazon.com/free/ and see what the limits are, and what's actually covered in the free tier.

You can also use https://calculator.aws to find the cheapest region for a particular service as well in the event you start getting outside of your free tier.

It's a game of research and monitoring.

@Hazarth on reason they do ask for credit card is to at least in part make it harder to abuse the free tier by creating a 1000 free accounts.

Sure you can use stolen cards or similar but then the user wont care about the billing anyway.

@C0D4 so theres no way to block/restrict myself from using paid tiers? I just have to constantly stress about the services im using and making sure to stop them if the alert exceeds my budget?

@hitko I don't buy that as an analogy. If you behave reasonably when test driving a car for free, you will not be charged. If you behave reasonably when testing what AWS says is "free", it's entirely possible that you will be charged a substantial amount of money. If test driving a car for "free" were to actually involve driving without doing a very large number things that are usual when driving a car, or facing large charges, people would warn their friends about that. I'm doing the equivalent here.

@hitko I also don't agree with the analogy

When you do a free test drive and you go over the speed limit and crash then the damages you pay is because you caused tangible damage to the product

AWS has a very simple choice of graying out the paid options and show you a big modal saying "Sorry, this would put you out of free tier, do you want to continue and be charged?"

If the car dealership had the option to open a large modal in real life and pause the world for a second before you cause damage to their property or even kill yourself, I'm pretty sure they would...

A better analogy is that you were offered a free car repair service, the dude came, and you asked him to also change your tires, to which he said nothing, did it, and then asked for money.

yes, there was a sign somewhere in their shop saying "free service excludes changing tires" that you missed, but wouldn't you expect the employee to still notify you: "sir, can do, but it's not covered by the free service"?

@Voxera Yeah, but also they can do the same thing just by asking for a phone number and forcing you to enable 2FA while you're there.

It's still more effort to get a fake number that you can actually log into reasonably comfortably to put in the 2fa code... what are you gonna do, pay for Twilio numbers instead? Try free numbers off the net until you realize that everyone else had the same idea and they are already taken?

I think they had options

@spongegeoff No, you're just spreading bullshit. AWS isn't a free product. It's not a consumer-oriented product. It doesn't have a fucking free trial. It doesn't have any kind of "free subscription" or "free licence". You agree to use an actual product with an actual price, and they agree not to charge you for it. Get that in your thick dumb head and learn some fucking responsibility, the world doesn't have to constantly babysit your lazy ass.

@Hazarth Cloud infrastructure isn't the same as digital goods. How fucking hard is that to understand? Even if you access it over the internet, it's still a physical product that costs money, takes up space, and consumes electricity. Free trial or free licence for digital goods doesn't have any additional cost for the company - AWS can't give that kind of free trial, because they don't offer that kind of goods. They give you access to the actual physical products with actual price behind them, and they agree not to charge you if you only use them within the specified limits. If people can understand that when they rent or borrow things in person, why the fuck is it so hard to understand when you rent or borrow infrastructure in a data centre?

@hitko You can fuck off too. Happy to come down to your level of reasoning. As I said, I don't use AWS, so don't need anyone to babysit me on it. Their "cap" isn't a cap (it's an email notification) and "free" (their word) is not free. If anyone's a moron it's those that fall for 'it's cheaper, because you only pay for what you use!!!!' line. It's a ludicrously overpriced service that 99.9% of businesses should avoid.

@hitko if nothing in aws is a free trial then why the fuck do they call it a free trial you fucking dumbass?

@b2plane Learn to fucking read, they call it "AWS Free Tier", not "AWS Free Trial". And if you look it up, every cloud infrastructure provider offers "free tier", not "free trial". It means a completely different thing, but some people here are too thick in the head to understand that. Coincidentally, those are the same people that somehow can't find a job.

@hitko So, essentially, you don't think it's reasonable to think that a "Free Tier" would be free? I'd expect all 'free' things to be free.

@spongegeoff

And the free tier is indeed free.

Anything outside of that free tier is not free.

It's not a hard concept.

We could debate if that's good UX or if they could warn that more prominently, but as @hitko so concisely said, free tier =/= free trial.

@hitko The concept is not hard to understand, I never said it was. I'm only saying that AWS has the very simple option to protect users against accidentally being charged and they didn't implement it. I argue that that's a very deliberate choice on their side, because accidental money is as good as any other money, but this is a scummy tactic.

it's similar to the concept of "not telling the truth". You don't have to lie to mislead someone, but you can choose not to say the truth and remain silent to manipulate the person into doing what you want. Not exactly the same thing, because yes, they do tell you how the free tier works and what the limits are, but at the same time this is not the first story of someone accidentally being charged on AWS. The facts are that this shit keeps happening to people, and AWS simply doesn't mind. they decide to do nothing, because obviously it still makes them money. This is what we call in the industry a "dick move"

@CoreFusionX Not a hard concept, but if you have signed up for the free tier - and nothing else, so you simply don't have any account other than the one for the free tier - it isn't legit to start drawing from the credit card (on the free tier account) for services that are outside of the free tier.

@spongegeoff

See?

That's the thing. It seems it's a hard concept after all.

You *don't* sign up for a free tier. That would be a free trial.

No. You sign up for a service. A *paid* service.

If you do your due diligence and stay within the tier they allow you for free (but are in no way obligated, because, again, it's *not* a free trial), you won't be charged.

If you don't do your due diligence and then complain, I'm afraid I'll have to subscribe to the "no wonder the ones complaining are the ones who can't land a job"...

@CoreFusionX "It seems it's a hard concept"
You're talking nonsense, I'm disagreeing with you.
"You don't sign up for a free tier. That would be a free trial."
It's called the AWS Free Tier.

Smoke dope much?

@spongegeoff

Well, you are straight posting wrong facts like you being able to sign up for an AWS free tier account, when no such thing exists.

And as such, it's perfectly legit to charge you if you use stuff that is outside the free tier.

What can I say?

Not looking for a job, btw. Got one and very happy with it.

@spongegeoff from their terms for free tier

”If I go over the Free Tier limit in a given month, how much will I have to pay?

If your usage exceeds the monthly free tier limits, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go AWS service rates”

So, read the contract you agreed to.

https://aws.amazon.com/free/...

@spongegeoff
Have you actually tried to, you know, follow that link?

Then you would see that you still have to provide a credit card, and the same rules we have already established apply.

The only way to register an AWS account without credit card, and therefore, unbillable directly to you is through some sort of student/academic partnership.

@Voxera Why would I bother? I just avoid AWS - problem solved.

@spongegeoff sure, just do not blame them, they did specify exactly what rules applied to the free tier.

@Voxera Let's be clear: I do blame them. I believe AWS should be avoided.

It's unfortunate that a business can offer one thing very clearly in its advertising and then fall back on contradictory statements it makes elsewhere, but it's (in the UK at least) borderline legal. In practice though, you can reasonably assume that a commercial organisation is conducting its business honestly - for example, it will only charge you for things with your active agreement. Most businesses cannot afford to become known for duplicitous dealing, so you can trust them. AWS deserves to acquire a reputation for being what it is - an organisation that may charge you a substantial amount of money for even minimal (and usually bundled for free) services you use - or quite possibly, merely leave enabled - via its "Free Tier Account".

@CoreFusionX No, I haven't "tried to" follow that link. As someone who has built software that spiders the WWW very efficiently, I assume I'd be able to.