The flip side: Dynamo gets expensive and it gets expensive quick, and being a custom API (and, indeed, a very different way to think about datastores) makes migration difficult.
It's great to use, if you understand the tradeoffs. Just make sure you understand them before you make the leap.
DynamoDB's pricing scales sublinearly with volume; if it starts getting expensive it was an initial misuse of DynamoDB that got obvious with scale. There are a lot of factors that go into whether you should use DynamoDB and how you implement it. I recommend anyone who is considering using it very carefully understand this page first: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developergu...
https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Query-of-Despair
You do this on your own server, slowness and bad performance are the result (but it may never, or very rarely get called). You do it on dynamo, a $10k bill may be the result.
The only way you could be "surprised" with a $10k bill is if you set up autoscaling for it with your upper limits (which it requires you to choose) high enough to reach $10k. And then you'd have to forget that you did that.
But I agree, I also don't like running databases billed by load. The risk of costly bugs is just too high.
Of course as you scale this an be less true, so it's all in the application.