AWS Free Tier, where's your spending limit? 'I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200'
Analysis Amazon Web Services has come under fire for lack of hard spending limits on accounts, after some users reported unexpected bills from what they thought were tutorial accounts.
AWS does not have a freemium business model (unlike, say, GitHub or Dropbox), but it does have "free tier" services that cost nothing to use, within their constraints (which may be severe).
The company provides these not out of generosity but to enable experimentation, presumably in the hope that this leads in due course to paying customers. There can be bill shocks though, as the company provides no built-in feature that caps spending to zero or even to a specified amount.
The issue came up earlier this month when cloud architect Forrest Brazeal reported on Twitter about a student who attended a Sagemaker (the AWS machine learning toolkit) tutorial and was sent a $200 bill, saying "I thought I deleted everything but I have been charged $200."
It is not a new issue though. AWS billing consultant Corey Quinn asked last year "Is the AWS Free Tier really free", and said, "it absolutely is not … the AWS Free Tier is free in the same way that a table saw is childproof. If you blindly rush in to use an AWS service with the expectation that you won’t be charged, you’re likely to lose a hand in the process."
