You deleted everything and AWS is still charging you?

"Here’s the part that actually gets to me as a Developer Advocate. When a student gets a surprise bill, they don’t usually think “I missed a step in my cleanup.” They think “AWS secretly charges you even after you delete stuff.” They tell their classmates and that becomes the narrative. I’ve heard it in person, on discord, etc. “Be careful with AWS, they’ll charge you for nothing.” It’s not cool because it can scare people away from learning skills that would genuinely help their careers."

Maybe it teaches some of them not to stick their hand in lawnmowers.

When I was a student, I had an account at Citizens Bank, which had a branch on-campus. I pretty much never used it: I put some money in at the beginning, occasionally added some; used the ATM from time to time.

At the end of four years, I decided to close my account. There was less money in there than I thought there should be. I demanded an accounting. They happily demonstrated that there was a disclosed-only-in-fine-print fee charged each month that I didn't use the account according to some arcane formula. They wouldn't refund the fee.

So for the thirty or forty years since, I've never used Citizens Bank for anything, even if it would have been convenient. And I discouraged other people from doing so. I imagine I've cost them several thousand times those fees in revenue over the years.

Anyway, this is a story about AWS and their no-good, horrible-by-design billing practices.

> I used to feel this.

Old you was right. No student should ever enter personal payment information into AWS. You cannot afford the mistake.

They have chosen not to make a safe way to use it without financial risks.

We used to use this at work https://github.com/ekristen/aws-nuke

> AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap. The purpose of this post is to shed some light on this.

Or it's a UX gap. If this is such a common complaint that's causing meaningful reputation damage, surely there'd be a better way to communicate this in the product? I think it's fair to assume that there's less interest in building features that encourage users to spend less money.

They send me an email every month stating I owe $0.28 or they 'll close the account. It's been 5 years now.

I recently dealt with something similar with a CDN I used for a project 3 years ago. They kept charging me $0.01/month after I got all of my content off of their servers. Took months to resolve, luckily was pennies so it wasn't a big deal but very frustrating.

Interesting that the author flags what is actually one of my pet peeves ...

> [Snapshots] get created automatically, often during deletion workflows, and nobody thinks to look for them.

creating random backups of things you are shutting down "just in case" that you must then remember to go back and delete. It's especially annoying if you stood up an EC2 instance or whatever, realized you messed up the configuration and immediately shut it down. Now you have a pile of poop running up your bill that you need to find and delete.

The way this guy writes makes me want to puke. "Whoa dude, the hidden setting in AWS got you charged and now you're warning your friends about it? That's uncool dude, you're discouraging them from learning! As a Developer Advocate, let me advocate the corporations interests to you, the developer."

this happened to me. they refunded me after i contacted support!

AWS sends me an invoice for $0.01 every month.