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Comment by minot | Hacker News Reader

Is there still no easy straightforward way in $current_year to put an absolute spend cap of say USD 0, USD 5, or USD 10 per month on Amazon.com web services or Google Cloud Platform?

I’d think I’d like to prepay a fixed dollar amount like USD 200 IF I anticipate some major event but really this is problematic for students. I just want to use the free tier. Why is this so hard?

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The common excuse is "billing is heavily distributed and every product does it differently, so it's impossible to implement limits", but yeah, you're probably not the target audience.

A coworker runs a charity site (online monument for Market Garden), and because of its charity purpose, he got some free budget for Azure. He calculated that at the expected usage, that year budget was more than enough to last him a year. Until he activated some innocuous function, and suddenly it ate through his entire budget in a month, so he couldn't afford to stay on Azure anymore.

Yes. A hard cost limit isn't a hard cost limit unless they start deleting resources like databases which has its own problems. One can imagine a semi-hard cost limit that only cuts off stateless services like EC2 and data egress but AWS apparently just doesn't care enough about courting customers like the GP to implement.

I agree that there is some financial risk to using AWS although my understanding is that they're pretty forgiving of surprise bills--at least the first time.

A googler recently commented here that, in order to forgive "bigger" bills, you really need to know someone to pull some heavy strings for you - and that it doesn't happen in many cases.

This taught me to be very very careful with this stuff, and to not bet on Google or Amazon being nice to me when I am bound to mess something up at some point - because with the complexity these services carry, it's no wonder people fall into cost traps all the time.

I do use AWS S3 for storage and it's very cheap for my needs. But I do periodically think about switching to a VPS (or to Backblaze which does let you set a hard cap).

I also help out a small non-profit newspaper mostly operated by students. We're going to need some storage for an archiving project and there's no way in hell I'm going to use AWS for that.

There are also cloud storage providers that do not charge for transfer or egress, etc.

There’s one in particular I’m thinking of…

It's Wasabi S3 https://wasabi.com, and ridiculously cheap for storage.

I don't think so. It would be great though to encourage dabbling.

I am glad that my customers and company pays the bills because they can fluctuate very noticeably.

For private use I still host my own server just because the costs are fixed an I know what I am getting.

It used to be possible to do that with Google App Engine at least.

What's worse is that it costs something like $90 per TB of outbound bandwidth. That is absolute robbery and it is consistent across the cloud cartel.

You're not a customer they want.

I might be the future customer they would want, if I were able to learn with no risk of costly errors what their platform can do and how to operate it.

You're probably still not that customer. You're still concerned about your own money, vs spending employers' money.

Free tier gives you a ton of usage across most of the services, but definitely not enough to fully host a side project. But e.g. you can use RDS (database hosting), S3, EC2, text to speech and do whatever you want in a small scale for a year. It's kind of enough to learn for certificates.

I forgot to remove NAT Gateway for a few weeks while learning bits and pieces of VPC usage and it ended up costing me 25$... what can you do.

they have alerts that can email you if you are approaching a limit but i don't think you can tie that to some automated shutting down of your stuff (i might be wrong i haven't worked in aws heavily for about 2 years now... believe others with more recent exp if they comment otherwise) tbh i kind of get why it is like this, aws is a business and they are only looking for your money. responsibility for keeping your pants up at aws is on the admins.

I think you can tie alerts to automated actions that you write although I've never done so myself. Of course, that requires anticipating what could happen and what you're OK with taking down.

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