I just searched for this and this documentation entry came up:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/whitepapers/latest/aws-best-prac...

I can't believe that their 'fix' is to set a wildcard dns entry, this feels somewhat like a joke.

Does this mean that a NXDOMAIN response costs more than a successful response?

It has the same cost as a successful response which can quickly add up to a few hundred dollars per month with a couple of DNS enumeration scans.

Google Cloud and Azure also bill DNS like this. Unless you need some of the advanced features you really shouldn't host your DNS in the big cloud providers.

Cloudflare don't bill like this, part of why I moved off route 53.

Neither does Digital Ocean, for that matter.

That’s not entirely true - aliases to AWS resources are free (their suggested “workaround”).

You should never actually use Route53 for your domains. Delegate a subdomain like cloud.yourcompany.net to R53 and use that.

Why?

That's not analogous.

It’s still a huge problem for people that have purchased domains. I bought one that apparently used to be a BT tracker, and gets on the order of several hundred NXDOMAIN requests per second.

I understand it’s still hitting Route53 infrastructure, but I’m not using it, and it’s not commonplace to charge for NXDOMAIN records. Because of this, I’m unable to host at AWS (prohibitively expensive for my use-case).

It’s worth mentioning that DNS infrastructure for things like this are very cheap (I used to self-host the DNS infrastructure for this domain for ~$2.5/mo), so the up charge is even worse that what AWS is charging for bandwidth. If they brought it in line with actual costs, I wouldn’t have as much of a problem.

A book could be written about AWS "overcharged" services

Totally agree with this. In their defense (not that I like it), obviously the market is willing to pay what they charge. It’s unfortunate that the other big cloud providers haven’t driven prices down that much.

You're not screaming on twitter about it so it will never happen...