This is why I don't use AWS for personal projects (S3 is the only one I'd consider using). EC2 for example is significantly more expensive than a Digital Ocean droplet.
Re:DigitalOcean is laying off staff
by banana_giraffe on Friday January 17, 2020 @08:43PM
(#22081570)
Even S3 can hit random expenses when you least expect it. I let a process go crazy and create billions of objects in S3. Of course AWS was happy to charge me for all of this, but what I wasn't expecting was the charge just to list the objects to delete them. I spent more than $100 just to empty the stupid bucket out.
It's one of those situations where it's a death by a thousand cuts. When you're cost provisioning, you can figure out the big stuff, i.e., we need 25 EC2s m4a.2xlarge instances with 40TB of S3 storage, and a 2TB Aurora instance. But once you get the bill, you start seeing the costs of ELBs, NAT gateways, inter-region transfers, etc. Individually, these costs aren't significant, but in aggregate, they can make up a health chunk of your monthly bill.
Plus, their managed solutions are fucking expensive. We moved a self-managed ELK cluster to an AWS-managed one and the costs went up by a factor of two.