alt Hacker News...and AWS does it too. I can go right into an account and see an estimated cost per hour, and even pre-pay at a fixed discount for longer terms if I want to. They tell me right there what it will cost. They do this for everything that is reasonably a "fixed cost", like CPU time.
They cannot predict what my bandwidth consumption will be, or other such variable costs. For those, they tell you rates.
No it's pretty bad. They show you the cost after all the resources are set up. Even setting up an ec2 instance, a really basic use case that has a fixed cost based on size, you have to go Google it and find their ec2 pricing table. It would take no space to just put the price per hour in the drop-down as you're picking an instance. But no, they obscure it on purpose.
That's just for ec2. Everything is like this. Super awesome when you're being brought onto a new project and trying to estimate costs for your client. And let's not forget the little tiny things that should cost nothing. A NAT gateway with no redundancy is $30/mo. That's a fun surprise.