[zedpm]

It's worth noting that AWS's free tier has absolutely no safety net and you can easily end up with an unexpected bill, sometimes a very large one. The single best thing AWS could do to encourage people to learn about its services by trying them out would be to have a safe-by-default billing configuration. A user should have to flip a switch in their account to allow any usage over a given dollar amount, with services being halted in the event they would breach this limit without having flipped that switch.

[JulianRaphael]

You would be surprised how many users don't want that. Take e.g. a startup run by two people in Singapore that gets featured on HN unbeknownst to the founders as they are asleep. They experiences a ton of traffic, which makes them exceed the free tier limits. If you were one of these founders, what reality would you want to wake up to? That your web app was hugged to death and you lost out on a significant growth momentum or that your web app stayed up and now you have to pay a bill to AWS (but hopefully have made some revenue, too)?

I'd also say that in the year of our lord 2022 literally everyone has heard about unexpected cloud bills (yes, happens with GCP and Azure all the time as well) and hence should know that they have to set their account up properly - there is a ton of tutorials by AWS and others on how to set up your budgets and billing alerts.

[pooper]

> I'd also say that in the year of our lord 2022 literally everyone has heard about unexpected cloud bills (yes, happens with GCP and Azure all the time as well) and hence should know that they have to set their account up properly - there is a ton of tutorials by AWS and others on how to set up your budgets and billing alerts.

> Technical Product Management @ AWS

Thank you for your reply. However, I must respectfully disagree. Even in your hypothetical startup example, we should default to do not charge people until they flip a switch saying they are in production. I know it doesn't matter to you right now because AWS has so much demand but I think in terms of developer experience (DX), it would be really nice if we could rely on some kind of a sandbox. Even Microsoft Azure has Visual Studio subscription, which has a cap. Please consider adding this option.