In April, a StopTheMadness Pro customer contacted me about an incompatibility with the Amazon Web Services Management Console. I had never used AWS before, but I noticed that it has a free tier, so I decided to sign up in order to debug the incompatibility. The first AWS dark pattern is that the free tier still requires payment information, e.g., a credit card number. Normally I wouldn’t agree to this for a free service, but Amazon the corporation already has my credit card number, so I figured (wrongly) that there was no further harm in providing it to Amazon Web Services. For better or worse, though, an AWS account appears to be entirely separate from an Amazon consumer account.
Like everything involved with AWS, the free tier itself is very confusing. It has many product categories, some of which are “Free Trials”, some “12 months free” (isn’t that a trial?), and some “Always free”. In my case, however, it didn’t really matter, because I wasn’t planning to use it for 1 month, much less 12 months. On April 17, I signed up for AWS. The initial email said:
Welcome to Amazon Web Services. Thank you for creating an Amazon Web Services (AWS) account. For the next 12 months, you’ll have free access to all AWS services within the limits of the Free Tier.
Fortunately, I was able to reproduce my customer’s issue (metrics weren’t appearing in the management console), which I fixed in my source code the next day, April 18. Mission accomplished, I then stopped using AWS. The fix was released in StopTheMadness Pro version 6.0 on April 28. All’s well that ends well, right?
A few days later, on May 2, I received an email from AWS:
Greetings from Amazon Web Services,
This e-mail confirms that your latest billing statement, for the account ending in ********, is available on the AWS web site. Your account will be charged the following:
Total: $103.26
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat…
I used the so-called “free” tier of AWS for one day and got charged over a hundred dollars?!?!?