Sure, you see a number but I was just talking with someone at AWS who said it you still can’t trust it to be up to date especially across zone boundaries. That means it’s useful when everything is working as expected but can be actively misleading when troubleshooting.

Other stuff was more debatable, but it just felt like dancing in a mine field.

You read "you can run Lambda in VPC", great, but there is a fine print somewhere on a remote page, that you'd also need NAT gateway if you want said Lambda to access internet, public network wont do.

You read "you can enable SSE on S3", but it is not immediately obvious, that every request then incurs KMS call and billed accordingly (that was before bucket key feture).

Want to enable Control Tower? It creates so many services, it is impossible to predict costs until you enable it and wait to be billed.

If pricing is intended to be transparent, then why is it completely absent from the user interface? Transparent pricing would be to tell me how much something costs when I order it, not make me use a different tool or find it in the documentation

If clarity causes customers to spend less it is disincentivized and since clarity is hard and requires active investment to maintain it decays naturally.

It's easy to see how you can end up with a system that the users experience as a dishonest attempt to get more of their money and operators, who are necessarily very familiar with the system experience as merely messy but transparent.

Neither is precisely wrong however your users don't have your experience or training and many are liable to interact with a computer not you. Your system is then exactly as honest and transparent as your UI as perceived by your average user.