The pricing stuff really bothers me with AWS. Maybe I missed something in the interface? (It's bloody complicated).

Seemingly Amazon can provide and spin up all of these services at a second's notice, but can't provide realtime billing information, or realtime predictions.

You have _so many_ seemingly arbitrary sources of cost that for anything moderately complicated it feels very much like the model is "use it, see what it costs, pay us for it, then cancel if you don't like it" which doesn't really mix well with, well, how I spend money.

Maybe it's a deliberate strategy to squeeze out low margin customers or something?

(edit: so theoretically, given that all the pricing information is public, I could write my own backend that comes up with a figure on the fly... anyone got anything clever like that? :P)