This might be speaking the obvious, but I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious. There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money. I think it's the play between incompetence and having absolutely no incentive to do anything about it (which is still a form of malice).

I've used AWS for about 10 years and am by no means an expert, but I've seen all kinds of ugly cracks and discontinuities in design and operation among the services. AWS has felt like a handful of very good ideas, designed, built, and maintained by completely separate teams, littered by a whole ton of "I need my promotion to VP" bad ideas that build on top of the good ones in increasingly hacky ways.

And in any sufficiently large tech orgnization, there won't be anyone at a level of power who can rattle cages about a problem like this, who will want to be the one to do actually it. No "VP of Such and Such" will spend their political capital stressing how critical it is that they fix the thing that will make a whole bunch of KPIs go in the wrong direction. They're probably spending it on shipping another hacked-together service with Web2.0-- er. IOT-- er. Blockchai-- er. Crypto-- er. AI before promotion season.

> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money.

I dunno, Aurora’s pricing structure feels an awful lot like that. “What if we made people pay for storage and I/O? And we made estimating I/O practically impossible?”

> I think that the lack of half-decent cost controls is not intentionally malicious

It wasn't when the service was first created. What's intentionally malicious is not fixing it for years.

Somehow AI companies got this right form the get go. Money up front, no money, no tokens.

It's easy to guess why. Unlike hosting infra bs, inference is a hard cost for them. If they don't get paid, they lose (more) money. And sending stuff to collections is expensive and bad press.

> There is no mustache-twirling villain who has a great idea on how to !@#$ people out of their money.

It's someone in a Patagonia vest trying to avoid getting PIP'd.

All of that is by design, in a bad way.

AWS isn't for tinkerers and doesn't have guard rails for them, that's it. Anybody can use it but it's not designed for you to spend $12 per month. They DO have cost anomaly monitoring, they give you data so you can set up your own alerts for usage or data, but it's not a primary feature because they're picking their customers and it isn't the bottom of the market hobbyist. There are plenty of other services looking for that segment.

I have budgets set up and alerts through a separate alerting service that pings me if my estimates go above what I've set for a month. But it wouldn't fix a short term mistake; I don't need it to.