I got an email last week from AWS telling me that since my Last Week in AWS account is now a year old, its qualification for the 12-month free tier is expiring. All good things must end, and I was expecting this.
“If you want to estimate your monthly bill,” ends the email, “you can use our forecasting tool in the billing console.” Wonderful– I’d love to be prepared for the inevitable bill shock next month is going to bring.
And this is where things went to custard, and inspired this blog post. I can see very clearly what my current free tier usage looks like. For example, for S3 I’m making a lot of GETs and PUTs– those will cost me $0.004 per 10,000 for the former and $0.005 per 1,000 for the latter.. I’ll pay $0.023 per GB a month for the little storage I use, and data transfer out is negligible, as traffic from S3 to CloudFront is free.
And this is for S3. I use a lot of other services!
To be very clear, I estimate my cost of free tier services to be in the tens of cents range, and I don’t particularly care about the economic impact here– but I know the AWS billing model extraordinarily well (I consult on AWS bills for a living!) and I still have to sit down with a calculator to figure out what my expiring free tier is going to cost me.
My point is that it wouldn’t take a lot for AWS to add a column to the billing console’s “Free Tier Usage” section that tells me what this will cost me at the end of the month rather than leaving me here wondering whether my next bill is going to be 48 cents or 48 dollars.
