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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

I had a $.20/month recurring charge from AWS that I could only remove¹ by completely deleting my AWS account. That was enough to get me to give up on AWS for personal projects.

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1. The key word was “I.” Maybe someone more skilled at navigating AWS’s menu structure than I could would have done it quickly and easily, but even though I knew what it was for, turning it off and not getting billed for it turned out to be a huge challenge. Thankfully it was only $.20, but if I were using the service for something that generated actual bills, that $.20 (and possibly more) would end up quietly siphoning money out of my pocket into Amazon’s).

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Sounds familiar. I’m being billed £0.01/month for something in GCP, I don’t know what even after digging, but I’m too fearful to complain about it or disable the account lest it somehow gets my main Gmail account blacklisted somehow.

It's possible to get billed for things not exposed in the UI. ~10 years ago, I had one of these. A Glacier upload chunk was stuck in a staging area for over a month. I couldn't complete or cancel the upload, or remove the chunk. Support was able to, and they refunded the money without much hassle. But I did have to reach out to support (as a <$100 per month customer) to ask. Glacier was new, so I chalk it up to it being a new product, not anything greedy or malicious.

I have been using AWS more recently but something I can't believe is how the whole UI/UX revolution of the last 10 or so years escaped them.

Starting from the login point, who asks to login to root or IAM user account in 2026?

Or having to change regions from a dropdown to see resources you own in those regions?

It's really in top 5 messy UI i have ever seen.

And it changes constantly "for the better".

Remember when they decided the best UI experience was to give everything a vague abstract collection of shapes? Early 2010s or so. Couldn't tell a damn thing apart.

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