Exactly. Google: gives me $300 of credit no questions asked and tells me what things will cost upfront.

AWS: makes me apply to a program to get credits and if I want to price out anything it's almost a full-blown research effort where I have to dig through documents and cross reference tables between different services and I still probably miss something important. Free tier is opaque enough to frustrate even "use it at small scale and see," because you still have to do the research to see if they are pulling a "your first hit is free but try to scale and WHAM." Oh, but they're customer obsessed, so after much begging and pleading they'll refund half of WHAM, one time.

I don't really agree with that comment. I think all of the megaclouds have undesirably complex pricing structures, but they also all provide pricing calculators. AWS has one here: https://calculator.aws/

If I punch in the services I want to use, I can quickly see how much they will cost, and it's easy. I recommend clicking "Advanced" inside services on the calculator if you want to be sure you're not going to run into an edge case that costs lots of money unexpectedly.

If you use any of the megaclouds without first understanding the price structure, good luck.

Personally, I think a lot of companies would be better off using DigitalOcean or some other medium-size cloud. The pricing is much simpler, and pretty much all medium-size clouds charge $0.02/GB for egress bandwidth, either globally or in the US, depending on the provider.

In contrast, the megaclouds make shocking amounts of money off of their extremely pricey egress bandwidth, among other highly profitable aspects of their business.

Even still, AWS is a solid cloud platform, and they really do seem customer obsessed compared to what I've seen happen on GCP.

I don't really agree with this comment, because we've gone through year after year of new AWS cost analysis and pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and always seem to be consistently worse than GCP and Azure. They never seem to fix the flaws in old tools, they just tack on new tools with new blindspots. Hence my comment about cross-referencing. If you're willing to put in a lot of effort across tools, you can get a complete picture, but it really does take a lot of effort and foresight into the exact structure that your solution is going to take (which involves cross-referencing documentation). Amazon doesn't make any effort to quote you a price once they have enough information, they always make you work for it. If a price transparency tool is gated behind enough effort, is it really a price transparency tool?

That said, I'll grant you that AWS is not the only megacloud leveraging opaque cost structures. They just leverage them more.

AWS support is genuinely a cut above, though.

My experience with AWS customer support was not so good. At the time I had very little knowledge about what I was doing so I can't recount all the details here, but the short version is I had a wildcard cert tied up with a resource that wasn't mine (something on Amazon's side was referencing it) so I could not delete the cert which prevented me from doing something with the associated domain name. AWS has no mechanism AFAIK to report a bug in their system, so I had to pay for developer support (which was expensive to me at the time). Even then, the issue was never actually resolved for me. I think I actually switched to a totally different domain name just to get around it. Here's a support thread where people are having the same issue:

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=249559

I use GCP now. I find their tooling and UX to be about 100% better and will not use AWS in the future if I can avoid it.

> pricing tools that always seem to miss the mark in a major way that's only obvious in hindsight and seems to be consistently worse than other clouds.

Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for?

I honestly can't remember ever being surprised by what things on AWS cost, and I don't think I'm that shockingly good at detecting hidden costs.

Cloudwatch costs have been the ones my coworkers complain about. The one that got me was sagemaker -- the console had a bug where if you went to a region without endpoints, it would pop up a tutorial screen and the tutorial screen would "stick," hiding endpoints in other regions. Which led to hanging endpoints, which were covered by free tier for a few days before costs exploded. We had alerts active, but they alerted when we span up the resources, which was expected, and didn't make it obvious that paging through all the regions ensuring there were no running resources (itself painful) and watching daily costs for a few days was insufficient to ensure that we weren't going to have a $700 bill at the end of the month (or maybe $1400 -- I forget if $700 was the half refunded cost).

When I shared this anecdote at Re:Invent, the sentiment at the table was "lol that's cute, here's my story with an order of magnitude higher price tag." There were 5 or 6 of us, and my story was the smallest surprise cost except for one other person who was even greener than I was.

> Can you provide an example of a service that the AWS calculator doesn't compute the correct price for?

Can you tell me how I should have used AWS calculator to prevent my surprise charge? You can't, because AWS calculator assumes you know exactly what you're asking for, and the problem with opaque pricing structures is that you sometimes don't.

Other clouds tend to be much more upfront about "this will cost X," "this is costing X," "you're out of free tier," etc.