AWS should provide features where you are prompted to set a hard budget limit when you first signup and services fail once that's exceeded, so you don't get surprised, but they don't. That should be opt-out.<p>(recent thread on this: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42133700">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42133700</a> )<p>AWS does provide free trial accounts with $25 credits in some of their training environments/partners so there already are /some/ ways to do this.<p>(AWS does provide a opt-in budgeting feature which can alert you if budgets are exceeded. Not the same!)<p>While on the subject, AWS should provide an account-level setting/feature such that if there are multiple people/users/IAM logging into a single account, there is a flag so that any resources invoked in the console by a user get auto-tagged with that user's ID/IAM-identity/etc. In a small business with technical users, this would be quite helpful.<p>I went to give my 10 year old access to my old AWS account to play around and figured I should add some billing guardrails and was saddened to find I could anymore setup Cloudwatch/Budget billing alert guardrails to SMS my phone without paying $X a month for the SMS setup. Email is supported so I suppose I shouldn't complain and I hate SMS spammers so I get it but still another scenario of an unfriendly experience.<p>-- Someone using AWS the last 11 years, responsible for millions of dollars in enterprise spend on it, and sad to see their customer-centric attitude only goes so deep. I feel it getting weaker over time but there have always been limits to it.