Agreed. Right now you can set billing alarms, but not actually freeze billing. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/...

Looking at the CloudWatch console, I see I can also add AutoScaling and EC2 actions that are triggered by an alarm. That still leaves open other risks like a bandwidth bill for S3 hosted content.

This is the main reason I keep a $40/month Linode running, when I'd probably save if I used AWS -- most of the time my instance isn't doing a lot. I just don't want the anxiety of a billing surprise due to a mistake, or a DDOS coming my way.

Have you looked at https://amazonlightsail.com/ as a way to make get a billing system similar to Linode?

As someone who has used both and DigitalOcean, Lightsail performance is absolutely terrible compared to the above. It feels like you have perpetually run out of CPU credits.

Lightsail is just renamed t2 instances with storage and bandwidth bundled in. Also, last time I checked (which, granted, was the week Lightsail came out), you can't even check your CPU credit balance on a Lightsail instance. You also can't attach an EIP to a Lightsail instance.

Lightsail is dumbed down to the point of basically being worthless. There's really no reason to use Lightsail over Digital Ocean.

Lightsail is a baby step into the AWS environment. Once you're in the AWS console and Amazon has your credit card number, a psychological barrier has been breached, making it much easier to start experimenting with their other offerings.

I lost $1200 to an s3 mistake when I was broke years ago, it really sucked.

I mistakenly got a 1400 dollar bill . I just called and said it was a mistake and I don't want to pay it and they said ok. Probably too late for you but maybe helpful for someone in the future.

They said my demo was publicly accessible and it was, I probably talked too much :(

Have you looked into a tool like Gorilla Stack - https://www.gorillastack.com/?

(Note: I have no investment in the company)

Thanks Matteblack (whoever you may be) - my name's Oliver and I got alerted to this mention of GorillaStack.

Without wishing to be too promotional, you can set a trigger to shut off EC2 when a cost threshold is reached. You can currently automate shut off of RDS but not yet from a cost threshold (that will be available shortly).

TLDR: we can do a lot of what you ask but not all of it.

Feel free to reach out if you'd like more info.

Oliver, Curious to know how did you get this alert of mention?

Probably from some online brand monitoring service. I've used https://brand24.com/ and it was quite powerful.

This is really dangerous due to the way clouds calculate billing, it isn't a mistake that clouds want to enable users to make.