AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach.<p>I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding.<p>Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it tidied up whilst I’m incurring significant costs.<p>The whole billing stuff is complex and opaque and there aren’t enough controls and limits on spend. I feel like I need to dedicate 1 x FTE at least on AWS cost control which is a high cost for a small business.<p>As a CTO, I’ve previously influenced $millions in spend on AWS, but would be very nervous putting my reputation on the line to spend big with them in future. I’m frankly losing trust in their commercial approach.

What&#x27;s the point, if there isn&#x27;t a discount for paying upfront?<p>Will some people&#x2F;businesses prefer this because it&#x27;s not &#x27;credit&#x27;—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country?<p>I am failing to see the appeal here...

Even though I&#x27;m no where close to the world&#x27;s best AWS developer, I happened onto a contract for a major stock exchange and ended up writing code that truly commands fleets of computers. What I learned: There are <i>plenty</i> of ways to optimize your AWS spend. Hire consultants, especially ones that do so on commission. There are so many tricks that work 99% of the time and will save you a ton. For example, read-before-update on DynamoDB. Puts are expensive, reads are cheap. Depending on your data you may be able to do the diff in code and only push the delta. There are many other optimizations. If you&#x27;re a growing business it helps to get help with this stuff. I never would have guessed were it not for the pros that worked for my client.

Does this mean I can set up a static website on S3, pre-pay fir the next hundred years of hosting costs and then pretty much forget about it? Because I would genuinely love to be able to do that.

Not much of a feature.<p>If that could be used as a hard limit that would be more interesting

I wish Digital Ocean would allow this. My country&#x27;s debit&#x2F;credit cards don&#x27;t work online reliably, my attached cards can start getting rejected randomly any time. I&#x27;m always nervous about getting my account suspended due to missed payments, DO is pretty forgiving thankfully.

Why are the top comments companies promoting their solution? Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s find to do so I just don’t expect them at the top.

Cheaper to park your money to AWS, rather than pay negative interests on your bank account.

No mention of discounts, so this is probably a purely cashflow &#x2F; tax management system.

Is this for Tax benefits? Where you could put in all your annual net profits for AWS credit?

This is really nice. Now just add that when the amount is met, everything stops. Or maybe dropped into glacier to accrue charges.<p>I’d like this to work like a prepaid phone.

Awesome can&#x27;t wait to give one of the richest companies on the planet an interest free loan.

I use Glacier For cold storage of family videos and photos. I have pre-paid for the next 10 years of expected usage. I just wanted to be sure that we would never lose that data, so I think advanced billing is great.

I was thinking about switching from Digital Ocean+Cloud66 to AWS but all comments about invoices and saas helping forecast aws invoice they convinced me to stay with Digital Ocean

AWS’s on demand pricing is high but their reserved pricing doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility.<p>Why is it just 1 or 3 years? What if I only need it for 6 months or 2 years? Can’t I just get a discount proportional to a custom length of time?<p>Why can’t I choose the amount of money I want to pay under the “partial upfront” option?<p>Why can I only reserve some AWS services and not others? Why can’t I reserve a certain amount of S3 storage for example?

Nope.<p>Used AWS for 3 years at a decent sized agency. It seems we underestimated how much not to forget checking and scrutinize every line item in the bill because our lighsail instances had another DB attached to it that we had no idea about, but was charging a crazy fee (converting our local currency to dollars = 19x)<p>There was much finger-pointing.

What I want is to assign pre-paid limits or just plain limits for a given resource group

ELI5 does this mean I can prepay and not be at risk for more than I have prepaid?

Sorry but I did not understand the ‘cool’ part. With Linode &amp; Webfaction I was able to prepay via credit card too. What is the advantage? To get block me if the credit is too low for s specific service?

Fwiw - GCP already does this through &quot;Enterprise Agreements&quot;<p>This is largely desired by customers with complicated acquisitions and budget allocation periods (Government)

How is what AWS doing legal btw? How can they charge people without limits? Isn’t this abusive?

Wasn&#x27;t this already a negotiable option?

Gotta fund the next space trip somehow.<p>&#x2F;s

The AWS unexpected bills service has competition.

I&#x27;m surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. As others in the thread have mentioned, the core problem of tracking your AWS costs and where they&#x27;re coming from is still a very hard problem for most organizations. Especially startups.<p>I&#x27;m a co-founder of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vantage.sh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vantage.sh&#x2F;</a> which helps organizations track their AWS costs and we&#x27;ll look at incorporating Advance Pay balances into the platform.

STORJ DCS (Decentralized Cloud Storage) has enabled users to pay in advance with crypto since day 1.