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Comment by rmason | Hacker News Reader

I'm using Google Fi. Once I exceed my paid for bandwidth level for a given month it notifies me. When I go 50% over it notifies me a second time. If I want to know the bandwidth used I can check it anytime I want on my phone.

Considering the huge amount of developers having problems of this kind how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

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Google did this to me with Adwords. They gave me a "free" $200 to run a test campaign but it never turned off and I was not notified in anyway. They ended up charging me $800 for a completely test campaign for a non product blog website that ended up not even getting any traffic. Very scummy behavior even worse than AWS. It was basically extortion because I would have lost my entire Google account if I disputed the charges with my credit card.

This is why I don't like to sign my credit card to any subscription service or anything similar. There is almost no way to delete the credit card, and it is hard to notice the charging before it happened. We should have legislation to make them offer one-shot charging without storing my payment information. Pay as my budget. Shutdown if exceed.

Privacy.com

Doesn't cost anything, can use different bank accounts for funding on a per card basis, configurable limits.

Except they are in the process of changing their bank that they work with, so that they can change the type of cards they issue, and you have until the end of December to change over all your old cards from the old format to the new one, which means changing the card numbers, too.

This is a royal pain in the ass for those of us with hundreds of cards registered through them.

If there was another service of this type that existed, I’d switch to them in a heartbeat. And I will no longer recommend them here.

1: That news popped up here after I posted this.

2: New accounts since around October are already on the new thing.

It wouldn't work anyway cause I'd just have a large debt with them they'd eventually lock my account over.

>how hard would it be for AWS to implement a similar system?

I don't want to be that guy who yells out from my armchair to say something is easy. But........ quota management at its core is incrementing a number, then reading the number back. AWS is already doing things plenty more complicated than that. I'm sure they could build this if they cared to.

Other providers let users put billing limits on their accounts. Seems like Amazon benefits when users aren't able to put a $30 a month limit on their accounts like the OP wanted to.

You are just making stuff up. AWS has all those things. Billing limits. Cost monitoring. It is all there.

Billing limits, as in, a hard limit over which resources will shut down and I can be sure I won't be charged over that limit? I'm pretty sure that doesn't exist.

If you have to be a domain expert to configure it correctly, as is clearly the case with AWS since configuring it is a whole separate industry, then for all intents and purposes it is not there as far as a regular user is concerned. If it helps, imagine a Cessna pilot who's suddenly asked to fly a big intercontinental aircraft without any of the assistance features turned on. All the controls are there, but as far as the Cessna pilot is concerned, they can't fly it.

AWS does not have billing limits.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cost-management/latest/userguide...

You have to configure (correctly) an AWS IAM account with permissions to run actions you have to specify when budget amounts are hit. There's no simple 'Do not spend more than $X per month' setting. You have to understand AWS's auth and roles to set a limit using an action.

Monitoring, alerts etc are not the same thing as being able to put a cap on the amount of money Amazon can charge your account for services per billing period.

You can budget but Amazon will NOT cut you off if you go over the budget.

At best you might get some alerts in a timely manner. Good luck.

How hard? Bees against honey hard.

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