At some point my role was to reduce our startup’s AWS bill. I managed to keep 7 figures on our books instead of handing it to AWS. But a message like that would have given me a heart attack in those days.

Long story short: it saved the company from irrelevance. “Well-architected” is for the hyperscalers’ balance sheet, not yours.

I made something that tries to highlight the humor regarding this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48950534

Yes have gotten that before the hundred billion dollar billing alert. Are you ignoring it? Unit error doesn’t do this does it? Maybe they were hir with malware?

It would not make sense for even a 1200 baud dial-up BBS from 1985 to charge by the byte.

In 2026, the gigabyte should probably be the default/minimum unit for something like AWS.

Given the wild but apparently "consistent" numbers I wonder if we could reverse-engineer the wrong algorithm with enough data points? Maybe the proper cost estimate has some relationship to the reported cost estimate.

Help, what is this number - US$87,967,679,887,258.36

Maybe this is a new strategy to scare people into finally locking down their old, unused AWS accounts. It sure worked for me!

If AWS was a predatory mobile gacha game, we'd get 300 apology gems as credit to our accounts for this mixup, to help us in our rolls for the next 3-letter acronym they release.

Do the right thing for the players, Matt!

Vibe Billing

I just deleted my aws account. I don't need these vibes in my life.