I recently had an experience where I was trying out the AWS Bedrock service using their knowledge base quickStart. I followed their flow for creating a knowledge base and then played with it a bit but decided it wasn’t for me. That was in April. On May 1, I received a bill from AWS for several hundred dollars. It turns out this index I created was costing me about $16/day. I had set up a budget alarm for $20 but it was never triggered. I contacted AWS support and they were very apologetic but would not offer any kind of refund. On the one hand, sure I should have deleted those indexes after trying them out, but there was no info or any indication provided that they’d incur a daily expense even when not in use. In fact, even after I received the bill I was not able to find the source of the expense because it was described as coming from OpenSearch, which I had not used. It was only after contacting AWS support that I was able to determine that the source of the expense was Bedrock.
you're absolutely correct about this. It's important that billing systems as well as product nudges you whenever you're using a service which involves charges. We're so much used to seat-based pricing or monthly or quarterly subscriptions that usage-based billing with transparency will lead to disputes like thse.
One of the original definitions of Cloud is per unit billing (eg electricity).
What you're looking for is not Cloud but what used to be called web hosting.
The website is not advocating against per-unit billing.
When you turn all the lights in your house on, there’s only so high your bill can go. If you get DDoS’d, it may almost be uncappped in terms of your cloud spend. It’s like being charged for every light in your city being on.