[HN Gopher] You deleted everything and AWS is still charging you?
___________________________________________________________________
You deleted everything and AWS is still charging you?
Author : ke4qqq
Score : 24 points
Date : 2026-03-13 18:25 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jvogel.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (jvogel.me)
| richbell wrote:
| AWS sends me an invoice for $0.01 every month.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| tbh, I'd send them 5 cents and see what happens.
| aljgz wrote:
| You'd be charged 200$ for manual accounting effort to figure
| out the mismatch
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| They send me an invoice for $0.00 and I cannot seem to convince
| them to stop
| comrade1234 wrote:
| Just pay it, freeloader.
| JasonHarrison wrote:
| Me too! AWS actually charges my credit card $0.01 every month.
|
| I'm surprised they don't just waive low balances, like many
| banks do [0]
|
| How is it economical for AWS to charge a credit card for a
| penny? I wonder what Amazon's agreements with interchange
| networks must be like...
|
| [0]: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/small-balance-waiver-a-k-a-
| lo...
| mikkupikku wrote:
| 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."_
| yibers wrote:
| No way this is being written seriously, is it?
| wbobeirne wrote:
| > 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.
| L-four wrote:
| The number one feature which would resolve this is. A list all
| resources page.
| redserk wrote:
| Agreed. AWS is downright hostile about giving you any idea
| about what resources you actually have deployed, to the point
| where it must be deliberately malicious. Even their billing
| page is terrible for tracing down the root cause of usage
| with the default configuration.
|
| You have to go into third party tooling if you want any
| chance of seeing what's actually going on, especially if
| there's any odds of you deploying stuff in another region and
| even moreso if you have more than 1 account.
|
| At this point, I'd say it should be a best practice of owning
| 2 AWS accounts, even as a hobbyist: one payer account with a
| HEAVILY locked down SCP and then a child account with the
| stuff you're deploying.
| dsr_ wrote:
| "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.
| knollimar wrote:
| Microsoft charged me 2 cents per month for 4 months and I
| couldn't do anything about it because they have a delay on
| closing accounts. It felt like a scam gym membership, but for 8
| cents.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Reminds me of a bank account I had in Australia back in 1999 (I
| think it was Commonwealth Bank). I'd opened it as I was there
| travelling for a year and it made EFTPOS (early payment by
| card) easier and cheaper than using my UK bank card.
|
| At the end of the year of travel, I went into the branch to
| close the account and they said I couldn't close it because I
| couldn't withdraw the remaining $2.11 because it was lower than
| the minimum withdrawal amount (I think maybe $10) and that I
| should just leave it open.
|
| About a year later, I got the latest 6 month statement that
| they'd posted internationally saying that my account was now
| $100 ish overdrawn, because they'd started charging me a
| monthly fee on the account, and somehow I was just expected to
| have known that. The previous statement hadn't mentioned it,
| they'd just started charging it because they'd introduced a fee
| for accounts with a low balance. It took about several long
| international phone calls (and back then they were about $0.40
| per minute, at least one was probably an hour long) to convince
| them that I had no plans to return to Australia in the
| foreseeable future, or to pay them the account fee especially
| given that I had attempted to close the account previously and
| they refused, and finally they agreed to close the account and
| waive the fee. But I'd spent loads in charges on the
| international calls, and they'd posted me a statement twice
| printed on heavy non-airmail paper, all because they wouldn't
| just let me shut my account when I originally asked in branch
| to do it.
|
| 25 years later and I still haven't gone back to Australia, even
| though it was one of the best years of my life. I'm going blame
| the bank for that (even though it was really just not having
| the opportunity to go again!)
| rationalist wrote:
| Deposit $10 then withdraw $12.11?
|
| Sorry you had to go through that clusterf*.
| dhblumenfeld1 wrote:
| 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.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| 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.
| sjkoelle wrote:
| this happened to me. they refunded me after i contacted support!
| yardie wrote:
| They send me an email every month stating I owe $0.28 or they 'll
| close the account. It's been 5 years now.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2026-03-13 23:01 UTC)