Amazon dishonest and hidden charges

While setting up Elastic Beanstalk (before switching to Heroku) I had to spawn many different applications on what AWS deceitfully refers to as their """FREE TIER""". This is, as shown above, a lie. It may also be one that justifies legal action but that is for another day.

Anyway, I had to navigate to the correct region in Amazon's infuriating puzzle of a console and delete the """FREE""" application that was not running any app but still charging me 10 dollars a month. On another note, whoever designed the Amazon console seriously needs to enter the age of modern web design. It looks like it comes straight out of the 90s. Honestly I have seen sites designed by children that are clearer and more user-friendly.
Anyway, I am just glad my business with Amazon is over.

Anyone reading this who is considering using Amazon's services, I highly advice against them. This is by far the worst experience I have ever had hosting and building an application.

Thanks,
Joshua.

Hi again Joshua,

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is free to use: you only pay for the underlying resources/instances/ELB. Some resources are always free (within some limits) while some other are only available for 1 year. The 12 months free tier starts as soon as you create your AWS account. The free tier includes ONE single t2.micro instance (or a t3.micro now). If you have used 2 instances for your App along with your ELB: you got billed for the second instance.

I have received many monthly reminders by email about the free tier limits and there is nothing hidden. You should have received such reminders around the middle of the month if you had 2 instances.
It is called "tier" for a reason, it is not a "all you can eat buffet".

If you do not like the the AWS console (they have 2 different versions now) you could always use AWS CLI (command-line), be it on Linux or Microsoft PowerShell.

If you are satisfied with Heroku: then happy days~. On a side note: due to the ephemeral nature of Heroku, you might keep your AWS account to combine your usage with S3...

In conclusion: AWS has no hidden charges (while the billing is complicated/complex maybe?). And good luck for your potential legal action against Amazon//

Hi Joshua,

I am an user of AWS and do not work from them.
I have to admit that AWS is not low-cost, however you can lower your current costs by considering:

• Reserved Instance (you commit to purchase an EC2 instance for 1 or 3 years)
• Spot Instance (you have to build your system around the fact that your system can be shutdown at any point in time so you will need to include Monitoring and re-launch of instances if it is the case).
• T3A instances are better value than old generation T2s.

Regards,
Chris.

quantumhosting wrote:
AWS Elastic Beanstalk is free to use: you only pay for the underlying resources/instances/ELB.
I know you mean well. You appear to be trying to help. But if you first say "Elastic Beanstalk is free to use", then ... but you have to pay for "ELB". Is "ELB" ... an abbreviation for Elastic Beanstalk? If not, why did you not spell out what it is? If it IS (if ELB is elastic beanstalk) you should probably find this guy and offer a refund just as a matter of honor for being even more confusing. "It's free, but you have to pay for it" is not a great way to remove confusion.

Edited by: PoundTeam on Feb 28, 2021 5:20 PM

Similar situation. Suddenly in December I started getting hit with Elastic Compute Cloud charges. Sadly, I didn't realize until March 03 (today), and I'm out over $100! Someone might say hey, you should be on the ball and watch for this sort of thing. Sure, I'll put watching for AWS charges to suddenly spring up in some month, as item 101 on my 100 things to watch for getting nickeled and dime over. I just shut down and deleted a few things. Next step is deleting my AWS account.

I'm seeing something similar I'm just studying some AWS services I create stacks then I delete them, so I'm baffled about being charged 398 hours per On Demand Linux t2.micro Instance Hour, when I usually delete everything after a couple of hours of studying, I'm checking and there's nothing created, so I'm not sure where this charge comes from.