That would make some sense if the edge-cases didnt have 10.000% margin.

I've worked at companies that were spending 6 figures a month on AWS and we had dedicated AWS employees who helped us understand our bill and keep pricing in check. We also had GCP and Azure reps constantly reaching out to see if they could win us over by showing us how they could lower our bill. Overcharging enterprise customers for things they're not using is actually a risk to AWS as it gives customers a reason to jump ship.

The whales on AWS aren't overspending because AWS uses the granularity of their billing to make sure they aren't. That's how they keep the whales happy.

For the little guys, I'm not even sure it's worth AWS's time to nickel and dime them. AWS hands out thousands to ten of thousands of dollars in credits like candy. I'm pretty sure it's more important to them to lock in whales when they're still minnows than to bilk an extra $500 a year out of a 10 person start up.

Idk about that, it becomes worse at larger scales. We're at 7 figures weekly with obscene amounts of waste. But at that scale it's like hundreds of Aws bills to understand.

Is anyone dedicated to working on optimization?

So you're saying that they can't implement a hard limit, yet are able to provide hard-limited trials / student credits? It's impossibly hard to believe they couldn't implement the pre-paid model

would you want your services to just turn off when a certain threshold is hit? If so, this problem is solved, set an alarm when cost hits X, use that alarm to trigger a Lambda to turn off the unwanted infra. AWS provides all the tools you need, you just need to use them.

Yes. Turning off is exactly what I want.

Generally, using cost reporting directly doesn't work due to the delay in reporting of the costs.

This problem should be solved with a simple form in the billing area, not a solution that probably requires upwards of 40h of work to set up and properly test to a level I would trust it with anything. Even then it's dependent on delayed cost reporting with unknown failure modes. It merely makes a best-effort at containing the costs and it doesn't actually limit them.

Yes, but I want this lambda to be written and run by Amazon. This was requested already in the first days ow AWS, they literally said they understand it is important for us and will work on it, and then stopped replying about this issue for many years, in spite of people asking for it and voting for it all the time. They know perfectly well what is going on and decided not to do it for business reasons.

Was it "I didn't understand it and/or put in the effort to understand it first" ? Nah it must be "theres a conspiracy to make it confusing so we pay more"

AWS has one of the nicer to comprehend billing systems.

Is there a pre-paid option?

Yes. AWS Advance Pay.

I couldn't find a list of "eligible charges", also that doesn't seem to mean advance payment would be the only payment option so I couldn't be billed and the service would just stop.. did I miss anything?

No, you didn't miss anything the advance payment is just an additional feature but you still need to give in your CC details so they can charge you if you make a mistake. The usual course of action is to stress out and beg them to forgive you, which they sometimes do, and sometimes don't.