from Hacker News

Stop Uncapped Cloud Billing

by raffael_de on 5/4/25, 5:25 PM with 5 comments

  • by andersco on 5/4/25, 5:48 PM

    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.
  • by everfrustrated on 5/4/25, 6:11 PM

    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.