Amazon then charged me one hundred thousand dollars as the server was hit by bot spam. I had them refund the bill (as in how am I going to pay it?) but to this day I've hated Amazon with a passion and if I ever had to use cloud computing I'd use anyone else for that very reason. The entire service with it's horrifically complicated click through dashboard (but you can get a certification! It's so complicated they invented a fake degree for it!) just to confuse the customer into losing money.

I still blame them for missing an opportunity to be good corporate citizens and fight bot spam by using credit cards as auth. But if I go to the grocery store I can use a credit card to swipe, insert, chip or palm read (this is now in fact a thing) to buy a cookie. As opposed to using financial technology for anything useful.

https://medium.com/@maciej.pocwierz/how-an-empty-s3-bucket-c...

About how you make unauth’d API calls to an s3 bucket you don’t own to run up the costs. That was a new one for me.

Customers demand frictionless tools for automatically spinning up a bunch of real-world hardware. If you put this in the hands of inexperienced people, they will mess up and end up with huge bills, and you take a reputational hit for demanding thousands of dollars from the little guy. If you decide to vet potential customers ahead of time to make sure they're not so incompetent, then you get a reputation as a gatekeeper with no respect for the little guy who's just trying to hustle and build.

I always enjoy playing at the boundaries in these thought experiments. If I run up a surprise $10k bill, how do we determine what I "really should owe" in some cosmic sense? Does it matter if I misconfigured something? What if my code was really bad, and I could have accomplished the same things with 10% of the spend?

Does it matter who the provider is, or should that not matter to the customer in terms of making things right? For example, do you get to demand payment on my $10k surprise bill because you are a small team selling me a PDF generation API, even if you would ask AWS to waive your own $10k mistake?

I worked for a small venture-funded "cloud-first" company and our AWS bill was a sawtooth waveform. Every month the bill would creep up by a thousand bucks or so, until it hit $20k at which point the COO would notice and then it would be all hands on deck until we got the bill under $10k or so. Rinse and repeat but over a few years I'm sure we wasted more money than many of the examples on serverlesshorrors.com, just a few $k at a time instead of one lump.

Pardon my ignorance, but isn’t that something that can happen to anyone? Uncached objects are not something as serious as leaving port 22 open with a weak password (or is it?). Also, aren’t S3 resources (like images) public so that anyone can hit them any times they want?

I used 1TB of traffic on a micro instance and it cost me $150 (iirc). Doesn't have to be this way.

At least stick a rate limited product in front of it to control the bleed. (And check whether the rate limit product is in itself pay per use...GCP looking at you)

To me, "serverless" is when the end user downloads the software, and thereafter does not require an Internet connection to use it. Or at the very least, if the software uses an Internet connection, it's not to send data to a specific place, under the developer's control, for the purpose of making the software system function as advertised.

That's just a problem waiting to happen while you are always running tests on production...

https://coolify.io/

https://dokploy.com/

Does it really happen to really have to pay such a bill? Do you need to tweet about it to be reimbursed?

https://aws.amazon.com/free/

Experience AWS for up to 6 months without cost or commitment

Receive up to $200 USD in credits

Includes free usage of select services

No charges incurred unless you switch to the Paid Plan

Workloads scale beyond credit thresholds

Access to all AWS services and features

If you get a dedi on a 10Gb/s guaranteed port and it works out to more than $3 / TB, you're probably getting scammed. How does "serverless" justify 150x that? Are people hosting some silly projects really dense enough to fall for that kind of pricing?

Just get a $10 VPS somewhere or throw stuff on GH pages. Your video game wiki/technical documentation/blog will be fine on there and - with some competent setup - still be ready for 10k concurrent users you'll never have.

Plus the VPS is just so much faster in most cases.

Single day Firebase bill for $100k - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43884892 - May 2025 (14 comments)

Serverless Horrors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39532754 - Feb 2024 (169 comments)

"What if your app went viral and you woke to a $20k cloud bill? $50k? $80k?"

If the answer is anything less than "Hell yeah, we'll throw it on a credit card and hit up investors with a growth chart" then I suggest a basic vps setup with a fixed cost that simply stops responding instead.

There is such a thing as getting killed by success and while it's possible to negotiate with AWS or Google to reduce a surprise bill, there's no guarantee and it's a lot to throw on a startup's already overwhelming plate.

The cloud made scaling easier in ways, but a simple vps is so wildly overpowered compared to 15 years ago, a lot of startups can go far with a handful of digitalocean droplets.

All these stories of bill forgiveness reminds me of survivorship bias. Does this happens to everyone that reaches out to support or just the ones that get enough traction on social media? I am pretty sure there is no official policy from AWS, GCP or Azure.

I told them that was a mistake and they forgot the debit, they just asked to no do again.

Still, it made me question why I'm not using a VPS.

https://www.troyhunt.com/closer-to-the-edge-hyperscaling-hav...

The amount of brainwashing that big cloud providers have done, is insane.

If we're building anything bigger than a random script that does a small unit of work, never go for serverless. A company I recently worked for went with Serverless claiming that it would be less maintenance and overhead.

It absolutely was the worst thing I've ever seen at work. Our application state belonged at different places, we had to deal with many workarounds for simple things like error monitoring, logging, caching etc. Since there was no specific instance running our production code there was no visibility into our actual app configuration in production as well. Small and trivial things that you do in a minute in a platform like Ruby on Rails or Django would take hours if not days to achieve within this so-called blistering serverless setup.

On top of it, we had to go with DB providers like NeonDb and suffer from a massive latency. Add cold starts on top of this and the entire thing was a massive shitshow. Our idiot of a PM kept insisting that we keep serverless despite having all these problems. It was so painful and stupid overall.

They don't understand what I mean by that. That's okay, they'll learn!

Anyway, this kind of thing comes up regularly on Hacker News, so let's just short-circuit some of the conversations:

"You can set a budget!" -- that's just a warning.

"You should watch the billing data more closely!" -- it is delayed up to 48 hours or even longer on most cloud services. It is especially slow on the ones that tend to be hit the hardest during a DDoS, like CDN services.

"You can set up a lambda/function/trigger to stop your services" -- sure, for each individual service, separately, because the "stop" APIs are different, if they exist at all. Did I mention the 48 hour delay?

"You can get a refund!" -- sometimes, with no hard and fast rules about when this applies except for out of the goodness of some anonymous support person's heart.

"Lots of business services can have unlimited bills" -- not like this where buying what you thought was "an icecream cone" can turn into a firehouse of gelato costing $1,000 per minute because your kid cried and said he wanted more.

"It would be impossible for <cloud company> to put guardrails like that on their services!" -- they do exactly that, but only when it's their money at risk. When they could have unlimited expenses with no upside, then suddenly, magically, they find a way. E.g.: See the Azure Visual Studio Subscriber accounts, which have actual hard limits.

"Why would you want your cloud provider to stop your business? What if you suddenly go viral! That's the last thing you'd want!" -- who said anything about a business? What if it's just training? What if your website is just marketing with a no "profit per view" in any direct sense?

If you didn't sit down with the documentation, the pricing guide, and a calculator before you decided to build something then you share a significant portion of the fault.

At the end of the day though the whole think feels like a carpenter shooting themselves in the foot with a nail gun then insisting that hammers are the only way to do things.

It's kind of amazing, though. I keep getting pressure from the non-techs in my organization to "Migrate to the Cloud." When I ask "Why?" -crickets.

Industry jargon has a lot of power. Seems to suck the juice right out of people's brains (and the money right out of their wallets).

Like setting a maximum budget for a certain service (EC2, Aurora?) because downtime is preferable to this?

it would be 2x more expensive and halve developer speed. also we would lose some internal metric systems honed over 20yr.

ceo told to go ahead anyway (turn out company was being sold to Apollo)

first thing we did was a way to bootstrap accounts into aws so we could have spend limits from day one.

can't imagine how companies miss that step.

I would be embarrassed to put my name on these posts admitting I can't handle my configs while blaming everyone but myself.

Serverless isn't a horror, serverlesshorrors poster. You are the horror. You suck at architecting efficient & secure systems using this technology, you suck at handling cloud spend, and you suck at taking responsibility when your "bug" causes a 10,000x discrepancy between your expected cost and your actual bill.

Just because you don't understand it doesn't mean it sucks

To be fair, support was excellent both times and they waived the bills after I explained the situation.

I'm old enough to remember when cloud was pitched as a big cost saving move. I knew it was bullshit then. Told you so.

Have the people posting these horror stories never heard of billing alerts?