Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night?
I just logged into my AWS account and I noticed every charge has doubled for my September usage, literally overnight!
I called AWS and they said this has been reported by multiple people and they still don't know how many accounts are affected, did this happen to you too?
74 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadI had an AWS account I wasn't using, but I didn't want to get surprised by any bills, so I set an alert to let me know when the bill was more than $0.
Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for the alert itself.
I closed it altogether after that. It's better for my sanity to just use a new email address and sign up again than to worry about surprise bills.
EDIT: It's entirely possible that I set it up wrong, or set up the wrong thing, but in any case an alert was all I was trying to do, and as far as I could tell that's what happened. I must admit I rage-quit rather than investigate too deeply.
They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge for that.
Some service providers such as Hetzner don't even charge for bandwidth up to 20TB, but somehow AWS found a way to hike the bill per HTTP request.
https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/
I'm baffled at the complexity of just ELB pricing. Do AWS customers just not care?
Otherwise there's no incentive for application developers to optimize their usage.
In my last company we charged per unit of work, but it was possible to send a lot of requests to do a tiny amount of work -- some customers hammered us with millions of requests to do each unit of work. It wasn't malicious and it worked with their workflow, but we lost money on those customers due to all of the infrastructure required for the request routing.
The company eventually started charging a nominal fee per request, which resolved the issue.
You sort of had me in the first part, but you lost me here.
Charging $3 per million requests for a HTTP interface service?
How else should AWS charge for API Gateway?
(I suppose it could be bandwidth, but that doesn't make sense as API Gateway deals only in small messages; unlike ELB, S3, etc.)
I got an alert for crossing a billing threshold only five hours ago, as expected for this time of the month; now the total is just under double that.
It's quite an intriguing error. I'm struggling to imagine how it might have come about.
[0] https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-reports/home#/dashboard
Cost Explorer itself also charges per use. I'm not kidding:
https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/pricing/
Every service looks to be about double, However if you go to the Cost & Usage report, it looks right.
Call me, aws. I can help. I know cron jobs.
Maybe Bezos read this recently and decided to use large values of 24 to compute number of hours in a month.
"We are notifying you that we incorrectly issued an early invoice for your September AWS usage on September 18th. As your card was charged successfully for this invoice, we are currently processing a refund for the unexpected charge. The refund generally takes 3-5 business days to be received by your bank and some banks may require additional processing time. Your full monthly usage will be invoiced through our normal billing process on or around the 3rd of October. We will send another notification when your correct September invoice is available. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this error.
There is no action required from you, but if you have any questions, please contact the AWS Customer Service Team by visiting: https://aws.amazon.com/support, and opening a case by selecting 'Create Case'. You can then select ‘Account and Billing Support’ , followed by ’Billing’ for the Service, and ‘Charge Inquiry’ for the Category."