How AWS charged me 33.73$ for “AWS Free Tier”
The lesson I’ve learned is: Nothing is free in this world!
I wanted to experiment with the Elasticsearch database managed by AWS more than a year ago. I’ve opened an AWS account under “AWS Free Tier” package. I played with it for one month, made some conclusions and after that, I stopped using my AWS account. After 1 year I received an email from AWS stating that my free usage of AWS expired and I would be charged for using their services. At the first, I wanted to delete that Elasticsearch resource. After searching for some time, I wasn’t able to find how to do it. Simply, AWS UI is not very friendly and it wasn’t easy to delete the resource. Then I found I could delete my AWS account. But I didn’t want to do that as I wanted to keep it in case I want to experiment with some other AWS products. From their expiration email, I found a calculator about the expected bill AWS would charge me per month. And that calculator stated a monthly bill would be around 0.01$! I’ve decided to keep my AWS account as I considered it nothing. However, after 2 months I received an SMS from my bank that I’m charged 33.73$ for AWS “services”. It’s 3373 times more than AWS calculator told me for just 2 months of “usage”! And I haven’t used that Elasticsearch database for more than a year! I immediately deleted my AWS account! And seems like I can’t do anything else now. I’m not a user of AWS anymore and seems it’s not easy even to contact AWS if you don’t have an account.
I consider this a classic robbery! Maybe somebody will argue that 33.73$ is nothing for AWS, but you can imagine millions of users like me, and then it’s a big amount of money even for AWS! The biggest problem here is that the AWS calculator informed me my bill would be around 0.01$ per month, and then I’m charged 3373 times more for just 2 months! And what somebody can expect if he/she runs his/her production solution then? As I haven’t used this resource at all! Let’s assume you pay 10.000$ per month for some ordinary website on AWS. What will you do when you receive a bill of almost 34 million dollars???
Seems like AWS is not customer oriented as they say! They are expensive and they will rob you at the first opportunity! Use something else, maybe the times of paying for dedicated servers will come again… Then you really know how much you will pay at the end!
