Why am I getting mysterious bills?
First of all I have to emphasize that I am a newbie (still on free tier) and I have not used any AWS services other than IAM on my account, I have read a lot of information on the internet about unexpected charges, but most of cases, the person who being charged had already using some services like EC2 and S3 on their account. So many people would advise them to check if the services they are using are causing extra charges. However, this advice doesn't seem to apply to me. After all, I haven't even created an EC2 instance, but my bill shows that I'm using Data Transfer and Simple Storage Service (no idea what these are), and I don't see how I could incur such a charge by simply using IAM.
Even though I wasn't officially charged because my account was in the free tier, it's disconcerting to see such charges appear for no apparent reason. Is this normal? Will I be charged without using any services? Even though the usage is very low now, I don't know if in the future, when I use other services, these charges will suddenly increase beyond the usage allowed by my free tier. Or after my free tier ends, I will have to cover these costs.
I am very confused now, please help me to answer this question, thank you.
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The AWS API is called behind the scenes when you operate the management console.
For example, using the Simple Storage Service (commonly referred to as S3 for short), when you go to the S3 page to view a list of buckets, an API call will be made to check whether you have buckets even if you are not using S3.
I hope you find this information helpful.
Hello,
These links might be able to help this ---
https://chaudharypulkit93.medium.com/how-i-debugged-huge-data-transfer-costs-on-aws-498608297aa4
Thanks
I understand, but like I said, the cases in these links talked about Region and AZ configuration issues that have caused the charges to increase, but I haven't experienced any of that, all I've done for my account so far is created a few users, groups, and roles in the IAM. Why would this cause charges such as Simple Storage Service Request? Does using IAM also cause these requests?
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Hello, today the S3 usage on my account has increased dramatically again, with Actual Usage going from 18 requests to 142, and Forecasted Usage going from 80 to 629. It's hard to believe that this is "normal" because at this rate of increase, I'm sure I'm going to exceed the limit given by free tier.
And these S3 bills involve many different regions, adding up to about 6. And there are different descriptions such as "Amazon Simple Storage Service GetAG, Amazon Simple Storage Service APN1-Requests-Tier1, Amazon Simple Storage Service Requests-Tier2" and so on.
With such a huge increase in usage in a single day, and with so many regions involved, is this situation really just like the one you described?
Hello, I always try to answer correctly, but I understand that my answers may need to be corrected.
You may review your billing with the information below and contact AWS regarding your billing if you find anything incorrect. Please create an "Account and billing" support ticket through the Support Center.
The documentation describes which requests are responsible for each of the S3 fees. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/aws-usage-report-understand.html
You can also check the API calls on the CloudTrail screen to see which API is being executed at what time. I think more calls are being made than you can think of.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/cloudtrail-logging.html