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Comment by shiftpgdn | Hacker News Reader

AWS works this way too but I’ll get dogpiled by Amazon sycophants and other people who have built their careers around getting witless companies sucked into the Amazon machine.

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Steve gave examples for the different kind of fees and that it's hard to track them and why. I wanted to ask you for examples for AWS. Would be good to know concrete pitfalls and traps.

egress fees, inter-DC transfer fees, IP fees, ebs storage fees, transactional fees on things that are transactional. If you don't carefully engineer everything you'll get left with a $15,000 AWS bill. This doesn't cost Amazon anywhere near $15k to provide, so they just "waive" the fees if you promise to be a good little user.

Don't disagree with this, but this is the same in almost all cloud providers. Want to get started with Digital Ocean's app platform? You're paying for Container Engine to store your containers, then App Platform Business just to support scale-outs, then multiply this for the number of services you're deploying and make sure you don't have egress overages etc etc.

I've never gotten a grand for deleting digital ocean block storage devices, though!

At least AWS gives me an invoice each month with a break down of fees. GCP just sends an invoice for the total amount. No detail, no breakdown. And I have never gotten any of GCP's many different pages under their billing system to spit out any numbers that make sense. Pick your poison?

Check out https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/export-data-big... - you can configure GCP to spit out pricing data to bigquery, to be queried however you like.

(I don't think it produces a volume of data that escapes the free tier, but I'd have to check)

If I remember correctly, they charge for the BigQuery table you use for the detailed export. In other words: there's a charge for seeing detailed charges!

All other clouds provide a detailed cost breakdown report for free.

what a grift

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