Billing inquiry

I understand your concern about the unexpected bill you've received. As someone using AWS for learning purposes, it's important to be aware that even stopped EC2 instances and other resources can still incur charges.

To address your situation:

1. First, you need to identify which services are causing the charges. Use the Cost Explorer in the AWS Billing and Cost Management console to see a breakdown of your costs by service.

2. Stopping EC2 instances doesn't completely eliminate charges. Associated resources like Elastic IP addresses or EBS volumes may continue to generate costs. You should terminate instances and delete associated resources if you're not using them.

3. For Lambda functions and CloudFormation stacks, ensure you've deleted them completely, not just disabled them.

4. Check for any other active services across all regions, such as RDS databases, S3 buckets, or Elastic Load Balancers.

5. To delete resources, go to each service's console and remove them. For EC2, terminate instances and delete associated volumes and Elastic IPs. For Lambda, delete functions. For CloudFormation, delete stacks.

Regarding the $15 pending charge, AWS doesn't typically cancel charges for services that have been used. However, you can contact AWS Support directly through the AWS Support Center. Choose the "Account and Billing Support" category when creating your case. Explain your situation as a learner, provide details about your usage, and request assistance with the billing issue.

For future use, consider setting up AWS Budgets and Billing Alarms to monitor your spending and avoid unexpected charges. Also, be sure to check the pricing of services before using them, even in a learning context.

Remember, while AWS offers some free tier services, many services incur costs even during initial usage periods. Always be vigilant about terminating resources you're not actively using to minimize unexpected charges.
Sources
High Billing fee | AWS re:Post
unexpexted Billing | AWS re:Post
unexpected billing price | AWS re:Post