Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

AWS is a scam not because it can’t save you money, but because they actively try to trick you into spending more money. That’s practically the definition of a scam.

Go to the AWS console and try to answer even simply things like how much did the last hour/day/week cost me? Or how about some notifications if that new service you just added is going to cost vastly more than you where expecting.

I know of a few people getting fired after migrating to AWS and it’s not because the company was suddenly saving money.

View on HN

Disclosure: Work at AWS.

I've never seen AWS actively try to trick people into spending more money. I've seen Premium Support, product service teams, solutions architects, and account managers all suggest not to use AWS services if it doesn't fit the customer usecase. I've personally recommended non-AWS options for customers who are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

Can the billing console be better? Yes. But AWS isn't trying to trick anyone into anything. The console, while it has its troubles, doesn't have dark patterns and pricing is transparent. You pay for what you use, and prices have never decreased.

Hell, I know of a specific service that was priced poorly (meaning it wasn't profitable for AWS). Instead of raising prices, AWS ate its hat while rewriting the entire service from scratch to give it better offerings and make it cheaper (both for AWS and customers).

I haven’t used AWS in a while but one trick that I recall was enabling service X also enabled sub dependencies. Instantly disabling service X didn’t stop services XYZ which you continued to be billed for. Granted not that expensive, but it still felt like a trap.

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

I do not support view that AWS is a scam, but price is something AWS tries to make developers not to think about. Every blog post, documentation or quick start tells you about features, but never about costs.

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.

Another example of a bit darkish pattern is listing ridiculously small prices ($0.0000166667 per GB-second, $0.0004 per 1000 GET requests). It's hard to reason about very small and very big numbers, order of magnitude difference "feels" the same. Showing such a small prices is accurate, but deceiving IMHO.

> pricing is transparent

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

No, no, you're supposed to use their cthulhu inspired pricing tool. I mean, you've got at least a 50/50 chance of figuring out how to use it before you go permanently insane.

If you're so incompetent that you can't estimate your costs, a fixed price microserver built into a dilapidated wooden shanty with no obvious fire protection system is what you should be buying.

In order for a system to be effective at achieving a goal its owners and operators don't have to sit around a table in a smoke filled roam and toast evil. The goal good bad or indifferent merely has to be progressively incentivized by prevailing conditions.

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.

AWs is pretty bad at telling you how much something you're not running will cost if you run it but I've never had any issues knowing what something has cost me in the past.

>Go to the AWS console and try to answer even simply things like how much did the last hour/day/week cost me?

Click user@account in top right, click My Billing Dashboard, spend this month is on that page in giant font, click Cost Explorer for more granular breakdown (day, service, etc.), click Bill Details for list breakdown of spend by month.

>Or how about some notifications if that new service you just added is going to cost vastly more than you where expecting.

Billing Dashboard and then Budgets.

edit: This assumes you have permissions to see billing details, by default non-root accounts do not which might be why you're confused.

> Click user@account in top right, click My Billing Dashboard, spend this month is on that page in giant font, click Cost Explorer for more granular breakdown (day, service, etc.), click Bill Details for list breakdown of spend by month.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com