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Damn, I can't imagine how you felt... Only the unique experiences in this thread are enough to know how f*cked up AWS billing is.

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Felt like a complete idiot, I guess I'm not smart enough to use AWS's UI in a safe way. When we start trusting tools, we inevitably become complacent. Some user flows are designed to be gotcha's. A little gotcha machine that generates |cost - refund| revenue. They gotcha, and there's nothing you can do about it but beg them for a (usually partial) refund. The refund is the thing that makes you feel better about it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Thats exactly the impression I got when I was reading the AWS docs. I am a student too and was evaluating AWS for a hobby project.

Reading the docs I got the feeling that the product is designed for big cooperations only. But not for someone who wants real price control. The free account just made no sense to me.

I ended up renting a cloud server ~3€ a month. (Not AWS) Looking at this thread this was the best decision I could make.

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