181 replies
6d
Over the weekend a coworker was helping someone in our lab prepare data for an important conference talk.
We accidentally ran up a rather large bill because while the EFS storage pricing was simple enough, the usage pricing bit us.
It seems like AWS' entire business model is making the pricing so confusing that you don't know what it will cost until after you've used it. It feels weirdly similar to the US healthcare/insurance situation.
More competition in this space can only be a good thing.
Not just the healthcare situation, but everything. There's nothing much more stereotypically American than "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed." Dozens of little fees on your cable or ISP bill, resort fees in hotels, service charges on your restaurant bill, fees on car rentals, fees from your bank when you so much as breathe on your account, and of course sales taxes which for some reason are never listed on the tag in any store.
People complain about this relentlessly, but never change.
Additionally, every single business owner I know complains that whatever it is they're selling, (1) it isn't worth the brain damage to sell to customers looking for the lowest price, (2) as long as people comparison shop in a harebrained way, hook pricing (aka up front pricing that looks low and turns out high) is only rational. It's not like they're providing a bad service for the cost.
Yes, many deceptive business practices are rational acts on the part of the businesses. That doesn't mean they should be tolerated.
Which is exactly why they should be banned to keep the market overall healthy. Preventing deceptive practices in a market economy this is a prime example of useful government "intervention", just like supporting contract enforcement or preventing theft
They can always justify it as not knowing the price.
The sales tax rate is different in different places. It costs a different amount to ship to Florida than Alaska and picking it up at the factory is free (even if nobody does). The advertised price is if you have your own modem, renting one from the cable company is more.
None of these are inherently wrong. You should be paying more if you're having it shipped to a remote location with high shipping costs, and the cost of that shouldn't be dumped on every other customer. But it's kind of a loophole if you want the advertised price to be lower than what people are actually going to be paying in practice.
There are some cases where not knowing the price is reasonable. As you say, shipping can often only be calculated if you know all items and their destination. If you advertise on national TV you can't name a price that includes sales price (unless the company eats the difference). But these could be treated as tightly regulated necessary evils, not as a justification that showing final prices is always impossible.
There is no reason you can't show final price including tax on the label in a physical shop. There is no reason why a restaurant should be able to charge a 20% service charge instead of increasing regular prices by 20%. If you are buying a concert ticket or airline ticket the displayed price should include all mandatory fees. They can upsell you on additional services, but they can't suddenly notice in the last checkout step that your price is higher because the website you are using is charging a fee; that fee was known to them at the beginning of the transaction and should have to be disclosed at that point in time at the latest. If you want to go even further you can also dictate that shipping and handling fees are only allowed to include reasonable costs of actual shipping and handling.
All of these are normal common-sense regulations in most first-world countries.
Sure there is. When the price label is affixed by the factory/warehouse then you would have to track where everything is going and be unable to share inventory. Also, if the sales tax rate changes then all the labels become wrong. These would ultimately increase costs for consumers.
Adding sales tax is also not at all misleading because the customer is not going to be surprised by it and there isn't going to be a competing merchant across the street who can avoid charging it.
There are also business customers with their own sales tax ID and they can buy things without paying sales tax when they're being incorporated into a product where they collect the sales tax themselves.
This is actually true. A mandatory undisclosed fee is BS. But it doesn't help much, because if they want to do it then they just make it "optional" where the way to avoid it is more of an inconvenience than paying the fee.
The last step is where you disclose your address. Before that they may not even know which country you're in, much less the city/state, and there are a thousand legitimate reasons to have different prices or fees in different jurisdictions.
That doesn't really help, they're typically charging the actual cost. They just don't include it in the advertised price because it makes you inclined to make the purchase online instead of saving $10 by picking it up for the same price but no shipping charge the next time you go to the competing local store.
There's a reason Amazon's major competitive advantage is free two day shipping, derived from having the scale to achieve low shipping costs themselves.
Price tags are pretty much universally handled at the stores. There are some goods where the price tag is attached, but that's more the exception and not the rule.
This is a solvable problem. So much so that if you've traveled in most nations you'll see that all prices include tax. Not including tax is a particularly weird aspect of US culture that simply doesn't exist in other nations, even those with a large amount of imported goods.
Advertising isn't. If the same ad is viewable by people in different states, what price are they supposed to put on it? Shouldn't this be the same price as what they show in the stores, or else people will have trouble knowing if the advertising was deceptive?
Don't most of those other nations have a uniform tax rate?
I have no idea what you are going on about. If you advertise 9.99, it’s 9.99. Sales tax isn’t THAT different between jurisdictions, so we are talking about the seller having to lose a small percentage of margin. Sales are mostly about moving items, so they are already losing huge margins at that point anyway.
Anyway, you can always advertise 9.99 + tax and show the actual price with tax in the store tags.
California has a 7.25% sales tax. Oregon has a 0% sales tax. A 7.25% difference is larger than the entire net margin on many products.
It seems like we've now gone from "there is no reason they can't do this" to "the merchant can just eat the sales tax and go out of business"?
Which is basically what they do now. You see the final price at the register before you pay. You also know that there is going to be sales tax, no one is being misled.
Putting a different price on the tags than there is on the ad would just confuse people and make it harder to tell when you're not getting the advertised price because you have to do fractional arithmetic on every soup can and candy bar to see if it matches.
Don’t advertise California prices in Oregon?
I was referring to city/county taxes, not state taxes. Tor example, a local city to me in the US had a total of 14% sales tax, while outside the city was 10%.
Anyway, a sale’s motivation is to move products off the shelf and make room for more profitable products; they’re already losing money.
California borders with Oregon. Radio waves cross state lines. People see highway billboards and then drive into another state. People use the internet and you don't know where they are.
A sale's purpose is frequently to bring customers into the store to buy other products, or get customers to try a product for the first time to drive repeat business.
There is also plenty of advertising that isn't discounts. Maybe your product is great and you want to inform the customer that they can get something better than the competition for the same price. Maybe you're just publishing a comprehensive price list for all your products.
And in all cases, "losing money" is not a binary result. Losing a small amount, or not making as much as you wanted to, is very different from losing so much that you go out of business.
If businesses go out of business from paying taxes, maybe they shouldn’t be in business. This isn’t a problem in the EU where countries border other countries and sales tax varies from 6-19-24%… so clearly this is a delusional problem that doesn’t actually exist.
This statement has always been BS. If you set the tax rate to a percentage of revenue which exceeds the business's margins, all businesses go out of business. "Maybe grocery stores shouldn't be in business" is so absurd that the statement seems designed to deliberately shut down reasoned debate by stunning people into silence or making them so angry they respond rashly.
And in this context it doesn't even apply. The issue here is that customers in Oregon are going to pay a lower price than customers in California because Oregon has lower sales tax and the tax is part of the price they pay. The business can't eat the tax in California so their only alternative would be to advertise the higher price. But if they have to advertise the higher price then many of them will just charge the higher price everywhere so all you're doing is screwing customers in the jurisdiction with lower taxes out of paying lower prices. This also reduces competition by making it harder for customers to compare prices, because a store that only operates in a state with lower taxes would then seem to have lower prices than one that operates in multiple states and has to advertise the highest price, even if it didn't charge you the highest price where you actually are.
Or it is a problem and you're just eating the cost of getting screwed by the law while defending it.
Unless I misunderstand, isn't this EXACTLY what the US does to ensure certain businesses are or aren't profitable in their smaller jurisdictions? This is how they entice businesses to come to their cities/states and they even compete on giving bigger tax breaks. I assume they also do the exact opposite to keep out businesses they don't want.
They're already doing this ... this just makes it so you can do simple addition in your head while you walk around the store instead of throwing in some multiplication -- and if you live in a state where certain kinds of items have different tax rates, knowing what those tax rates are.
This isn't rocket science, I don't understand why you are making it seem so complicated.
Traditionally this is called fines rather than taxes. The ostensible purpose of general sales tax is not to bankrupt every grocery.
Why do you have to do any math in your head at all? The register will do it for you at the end.
Surely you’ve been poor with 40 bucks in your pocket and trying to get as many items as possible?
When the prices are listed pre-tax then use the amount of money you have in pre-tax dollars. If you have $40 and the sales tax is 7% then use your phone to divide your $40 by 1.07 and that's how much you have to spend. You don't have to do the multiplication for each item individually and items with different tax rates are typically entirely different classes of product which are sold in different stores.
Yep, this is one of those "This problem can't be solved - Says the only nation that has this problem" situations.
You could as easily say that the marketing department not knowing the features of the product justifies them making whatever claim they want in an advertisement. Why should a company be permitted to advertise something they don't know to be true, let alone something they know to be false?
It's not that they don't know what the price is, it's that the price is differs based on factors that aren't the same for every person viewing the advertisement. Meanwhile most of these factors (like the local sales tax rate) are known by the customer, so they already know what the final price will be given the base price on the ad.
I have begun to think of this as a "large population error", and I'm noticing it in a lot of different markets.
At small scales, annoying your customers is bad business. You only need to lose a few before it begins to hurt. Customer complaints are more likely to be a consideration in business decisions.
At larger scales, a business can begin to preferentially adopt practices intended to drive away some customers. Perhaps you don't want the "pathological" customers, to borrow one of Patrick McKenzie's terms. You can make more money with less effort by being more selective about your customers.
At extremely large scales, you largely stop thinking about groups of customers altogether. All of your decisions are driven by aggregates -- did all sales go up this quarter, or down? The effort required to do a deep dive into the behaviors and preferences of any individual market segment may not make sense anymore on a quarterly basis. At this scale, you might be able to afford to annoy tens of thousands of customers and still have a very nice graph next quarter.
So, when someone says a business practice shouldn't be "tolerated", that's a perfectly reasonable position, except it doesn't actually work for businesses operating at extremely large scales. It's too difficult for customers to organize a protest in a way that will influence that business's decision-making.
So much business has moved online in the last 20 years, while the US has leveled off at 80% urbanization over the same time period, along with more and more businesses congealing into BigCos, combined with the recent domination of private equity: lots and lots of things are now operating at a scale where customer concerns just aren't a part of the business model anymore.
Coffee shops, fast food, big-box retail, online retail, SaaS, PaaS: all of these can thrive while running on exorbitant pricing and abusive customer policies, because their volume of customers is so large that it's nearly impossible to be so bad that you'll piss off enough customers to impact your decision-making. (Unless you're Sony.)
The intuitive answer is competition, where customers move from user-hostile companies to new ones.
The problem in my mind is that the largest companies have too much efficiencies of scale to compete with on price.
When competition can't undercut on price, it is hard to argue that customers aren't being served by monopoly mega corps.
Yeah, this is a pretty standard answer to the same market failures that so many people have been talking about recently. It assumes though that low prices are the best possible benefit consumers might get from competition, and it also assumes that megacorps necessarily lead to the lowest possible prices for consumers.
Chokepoint Capitalism is a pretty okay book that kicks the legs out from under both assumptions.
I don't think I'm making any assumptions about what's best. I bring it up because the most common argent levied against mega corps is using monopoly power to drive up prices, which I don't think is always true.
If people specifically want to break them up to drive down prices, I don't think that will always be successful.
I'm not really sure what you mean. The EU has managed to put together much better consumer protections in a lot of areas. There are large businesses there.
It's actually very easy (in theory). You (vote for someone who will) ban fraudulent and anti-competitive behavior, sue the offenders and have them pay huge fines. The fact that this very rarely works out is a failure of the political system.
This argument reminds me of pre-ordering games. People are simply too dumb to stop doing so, even if it's in their best interest. But those that do are often rewarded for not pre-ordering in the form of lower prices and more content, hen the game eventually goes on sale. It doesn't mean that pre-ordering should be banned, however.
What do you mean by this? How would “people change” to get out of resort fees or confusing pricing systems?
Vote for politicians that haven't been bought by big corp (yet).
Ban them. Here in the EU such behavior is mostly illegal.
people could stop buying from sellers with confusing pricing systems.
People are capable of change.
I believe they are saying that people fall for the hook pricing and won't go with an alternative that is upfront about their price (because it looks higher). If companies aren't rewarded for doing the "right" thing then why would they do it?
"people" as a group need to stop shopping solely on price. Btw, You may look at other factors but as a general rule "people" look at price.
California gets a lot of flack for having too much regulation, but this change is very welcome for consumers.
No more junk fees in CA.
- https://www.sfgate.com/food/article/sf-restaurants-junk-fees...
Is this just restaurants?
No, it’s everything. Restaurants somehow thought they’d be exempt and the article is referencing recent explicit guidance that they will not be.
Too bad DoorDash is exempt
I mean this is why a lot of first world countries have consumer protections that demands the retailer/service publishes prices up front. Course in the US there is quite a counter lobbyist group that prevents just that from happening.
The cheapest customers are always the most expensive to work with. It’s a sad reality.
I worked at several companies who for some foolish reason saw the cheapo customers as some untapped market and when they raced to the bottom they lost every time.
This is why other countries just have laws for this, it evens the playing field and removes the bs.
When it comes to healthcare, they absolutely are. The US spends more than double for the same outcomes as other developed countries.
And no, this isn't because of the cost to develop new and novel drugs (which aren't used in 99.9% of routine health care)
I have to say that my response to "not knowing what you're going to pay for something until you're billed" is basically, "well I guess we'll see if I can pay it then". You sort of start asking yourself, "what if I just don't pay?". I have a (deadbeat) buddy who's entire medical plan is essentially to give a fake name to the ER, and if you're poor in America, what else can you do?
The American government spends something approaching a trillion dollars annually on Medicaid, "a government program that provides health insurance for adults and children with limited income and resources."[1]
Seperately, Obamacare[2] created a private health insurance market where low income people can obtain free or heavily discounted private health insurance coverage, according to their income.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicaid [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordable_Care_Act
We live in Texas.
Sounds like your issue is with Texas, then, not with America.
Why perpetuate crude and inaccurate stereotypes that smear and disparage America in general? America is spending a huge amount of money every year precisely on providing healthcare for the poor.
Besides which, it looks like Medicaid does indeed operate in Texas, which is discoverable in less than 10 seconds of Internet searching: https://www.hhs.texas.gov/services/health/medicaid-chip/abou...
And, seperately, Obamacare's marketplace works nationally, including in Texas: "More Texans than ever before enrolled in ACA health plans in 2024"[1]
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/01/24/texas-aca-health-ins...
Have you considered perhaps that because I live in Texas, I know a bit more about those programs than you who have just googled and linked the top results? And that perhaps because I live in Texas, I indeed have issues with Texas (still a part of America in spite of the wishes of some on the right wing)?
From your own article (I knew this stat would be in there):
Why do you think so many are uninsured if it is so simple for them to get health coverage?
You said giving a fake name at the ER was the only option for poor AMERICANS to obtain healthcare.
That is categorically false, and testifes to some sort of deep seated bias against our own country profoundly embedded in your worldview -- one which extends all the way to glib counterfactual promotion of verifiably false information about the country and its supposed moral shortcomings.
2) Texas has a much larger population than 49 of the other 50 states -- about 30 million, higher than any state but California. Of course the number of uninsured residents will be higher than the national average. You didn't control for uninsured per capita.
Why are so many uninsured if it's possible (I didn't say easy) for them to get coverage? Probably, a large part of the reason is people who go around promoting the (completely false) common trope that "poor Americans just can't get health coverage, the government does nothing for them."
Pretty sure my buddy is an American - I've known him almost all my life. I'm quite sure he's poor - he asks me for money a bit more than I'd like. The fake name thing was just a strategy he developed after going to the ER due to a blow to the head which caused him to forget his name; I'm sure there are many creative ways to get healthcare, but most of the of poor Texans (whom I'm also pretty sure are Americans considering I'm related to a few of them) I've known just go to the ER and ignore the bills. It's probably not the best system, but it's the one we've got I guess.
As to point 2) I thought about including the info in my previous comment, but it wasn't in your own source material and I'm a bit lazy. So here, I'll do it in this one.
[0]https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/14/census-bureau-texas-...
Speaking as a Texan (also pretty sure I'm American) who lives with some disability, I can tell you that I've looked at the systems and it's a real fear of mine that I'll end up as one of these statistics.
Well hi, also fellow Texan here. State law requires hospitals to take in and treat any patient with injuries “incompatible with life”. This means a fake name is unnecessary, you can give the same name. You may be asked about a previous bill but that will in no way preclude you from getting treatment.
I’m pretty sure there is a moral to this story..
High numbers of people who have illegally immigrated and are worried about getting into programs subsidized by the government which might result in questions about residency status leading to deportation?
High rates of misinformation surrounding the costs of insurance and availability of welfare programs in the state?
I just looked up getting a plan in Texas. 40 year old male non-smoker in Texas earning $45k/yr can get insurance for $128/mo. They're eligible for an HSA, so they can put tax-free savings that roll over every year into an investment account to help cover the $7,400 deductible. PCP and preventative care visits are free. Generic drugs are $10. Urgent care out of pocket is $160. Other plans have slightly higher premiums but much lower deductibles, some have different co-pays.
Yes - my plan if ever separated from employer insurance is to manipulate my income and expenses (I have significant investments I can draw upon and access to a family real estate portfolio that allows me to live rent-free) in order to get the full subsidy. Most people are not like me however; my buddy has several times had his car impounded for not paying car insurance. I don’t think health insurance will make the cut in his budget.
Most Americans don't realize just how huge and extensive medicare/medicaid is. They cover 65mil and 88mil people respectively, including 40mil children. That's 153mil people out of 330mil population -- that's 46% of the USA's population. Total spending is $1.9T for both. A cost of $12,400/person covered. $1.9T is 7.5% of the total US GDP of $25.44T. Medicare/medicaid is a massive program. Bigger than social security at $1.4T. It's crazy huge.
In that case, why not just go all the way to Medicare for All?
Because with the current medical cost, it would be absolutely ruinous. The root problem is American health care is far too expensive. The entire system is massively wasteful and complex.
Seems like unifying it under a single, already-extant federal system would greatly reduce administrative overhead though, don’t you think?
What’s funny is I’m probably one of the people whose paycheck is dependent on me not understanding that to paraphrase Upton Sinclair. When I started at my current employer, one of the devs straight up said the government should be doing what we do and we shouldn’t have a business.
Unfortunately, several million people work in medical billing and insurance. No politician that is aiming to get re-elected wants to double the employment rate. It would cure inflation almost instantly though!
Obamacare is (largely) a failure due to insurance meddling and laws preventing government insurance programs from negotiating prices with drug companies.
I'm a healthy individual, not even 30 yet, never smoked, never broken a bone, and never even had stitches in my life. And when I last checked their prices, I was making only $45k/yr. For coverage with Obamacare, I would be paying $350/month for the "catastrophic" plan. Which includes no prescription copay, no dental, no vision, and only kicks in after I've spent $100,000 in one year, and it takes 6 months to take effect after signing up. It's only there for serious issues like losing a leg or cancer.
Obamacare is not a plan, it's a law that set minimum standards for health insurance plans, created marketplaces to cross-shop plans across providers on a single website, and created a system where you can receive government subsidies towards their cost if your income is low enough. At $45K, you would receive subsidies towards your insurance premiums.
I've bought my insurance on the ACA marketplace since it opened ten years ago. There's no difference I can see between the plans offered on the health insurance marketplace and those offered directly from the websites of the same insurers that offer coverage in my state (Blue Cross, CVS Aetna, United, Ambetter, etc).
The very highest deductible "catastrophic" plan offered on the marketplace in California for a 29 year old has a $9450/year deductible, which is also the maximum out-of-pocket expense for the year if you have this plan. A $100K deductible plan does not exist, and when you enroll during the annual enrollment period or after a qualifying life event, plans take effect the day you make your first payment, not months later.
I'm 10 years your senior and pay less than $350 per month with a lower deductible than the plan quoted above, with no government subsidies.
I use Obamacare in the rural southern way, referencing ACA and healthcare.gov, lol.
I'm also in Georgia which may have different regulations regarding the deductibles. I remember looking at the plans around 2 years ago and realizing that there was no way I could afford the premium, let alone the yearly deductible.
I just took another quick look at a non-Healthcare.gov site. Insurance for me would be $313/month with a $9,100 deductible. But it does not cover doctor visits, generic drugs, or specialist visits until after I pay the full $9,100.
Why would I want to pay $313/month for essentially no coverage until I spend 20% of my income towards a deductible before I see any benefits?
This is the cheapest plan I could find in GA. It said it would subsidize the $357/m cost down to $113 for $45k 40 year old Male non-smoker, single. It seems quite a bit better than what you are suggesting. (I used https://www.healthsherpa.com/ to more easily check out available plans.) It covers preventative care, and after the $9100 deductible, it seems to cover pretty much everything with $0 copay, as long as its in-network.
(You also get their negotiated rates when you go to the doctor, I assume.)
https://d3ul0st9g52g6o.cloudfront.net/2024/GA/sbc/2024_58081...
You get an annual doctor visit for free with any insurance plan. There is no deductible or copay. There are other categories that are covered with no deductible. My wife had a $13,000 IUD insertion under anesthesia at a hospital due to complications, and this cost her $0 with insurance, without having met her deductible, since reproductive health is covered with no out of pocket cost under all ACA plans.
I'm on healthcare.gov looking at Georgia's plans this year for someone with $45K of income. You have options starting at $129/month. Many of these sub-$200 plans get you doctors visits for $40-60, prescription drugs for under $25 each, mental health treatment for under $60 per visit. This is all without hitting your deductible at all, they're day 1 prices.
If you paid the cash prices for many of these doctors, specialists, therapists, they'd be many times higher than the insurance negotiated costs. Look under the "covered costs" estimates for things like mental health treatment, diabetes maintenance, broken bone treatment, etc and you'll see that the estimated annual cost for the insured is often half or less the plan's deductible -- which tells you that hitting the deductible is not when the savings start. I don't think my wife or I have ever hit our out-of-pocket maximums in a year, yet the insurance has saved us more than it's cost in most years.
You're going to start interacting with the healthcare system a lot more than you have in your 20s once you're in your 30s. We all do at that age. And if you have even the worst ACA plan, you'll start to understand what it's doing for you regardless of the deductible.
It's still expensive, I worked as a contractor full time for a tech company for a year which basically means I pay for my own insurance through Obamacare (though they did suggest insurance at work but they didn't pay anything towards it so it is just is in case you want a 4th party to help you help yourself). Still long before that I basically just said I didn't have insurance and would get the price knocked down considerably. Half the time it's cheaper not to even have insurance... But now I'm "responsible" in the hopes it might bring down the price for other things in the future. For planned events I recommend health insurance, despite how often it's not all that worth it. Honestly though my current insurance copay cost as much as being uninsured in other countries so I kinda laugh at this crazy idea. I pay about $100 to visit any specialist doctor and it only cost $80 to be uninsured in some other countries on top of the $350 a month I already pay.
Medicaid wasn't expanded in several states with tens of millions of people living in them[1]. For example, in Texas, nobody is eligible for Medicaid based solely on their income alone.
Where Medicaid is expanded, the income requirements for Medicaid are far from sane. If you make over 100% to 138% of the federal poverty line, which is $15,060/year for an individual, you are not eligible for coverage. For example, someone who makes $16k to $21k a year, depending on where they live, is ineligible for coverage despite making poverty wages.
[1] https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/issue-brief/status-o...
I worked in a couple of emergency rooms for a total of 6 years, and you aren't wrong. Assuming the care you need can be entirely performed within the ER, then that's a viable strategy so long as you don't intend to re-visit the hospital.
Hospitals are obligated to provide care regardless of your ability to pay in the moment, and of course they often take care of indigent and foreign patients, with the understanding that they won't be able to recoup their costs.
If you don't have your identification on you, then they simply give you a number to call and they usually ask to respond within a few business days because after that, it's harder to get insurance approval.
This all changes if you're admitted to the hospital and need surgery, because I think there's pre-approval required from your insurance carrier. Though since I worked in the ER, my memory is hazy on that.
If they believe you were deceptive and simply refused to be identified, then that is technically illegal, so they will put up your picture and will alert the police if they see you again. But if you never intend to visit the hospital again, it doesn't really matter. No one is going to hunt you down unless you're doing it on such a large scale that it can't be ignored.
This all said, I want to say that I still think it's an unethical thing to do.
I have a friend that incurred massive medical debts in college when their (college-provided) insurance refused to cover services rendered at the (college) hospital. The college then made all sorts of threats like “you won’t be able to graduate until this $$,$$$ bill is paid!!!”. Keep in mind my friend was only able to attend college on a full scholarship as a result of coming from a poor ESL family.
They ignored all the threats, the department in charge of threatening seemingly didn’t talk to the department in charge of graduation, and to this day (5 years later) they still receive near-daily letters in the mail requesting payment. I can’t say I find my friend’s actions unethical in the slightest.
Ah! The UC system…
As the old saying goes “If I owe you $100 it’s my problem, if I owe you $100,000 … it’s your problem”
Aren't inmates technically supposed to get healthcare? Could be a last-ditch option I suppose if you can't get something covered any other way. Personally I'm trying to stay employed to keep my coverage, but sometimes you can't outrun the layoffs.
Then pay for it with a credit card that gives you a random amount of cash back, and pay your credit card bill using your tax refund that came as a nice surprise at the end of the year, because you over withheld all year so you don’t actually even know what your real take home pay is supposed to be.
No wonder Americans have no idea how the economy is doing.
I'm always surprised by people who expect and are excited for their refund. Half the country is pitching about politicians taxation plans when all the while they're volunteering to overpay out of every paycheck.
and then pay % of your refund as a fee to CPA, so they help you maximize your refund.
When you lack the self-control to save, over-withholding + refund becomes an ersatz year-long savings account. It's terrible, lacking any interest at all, but when it's all you've got, breaking open the piggy bank to get your money back feels good even if it doesn't make financial sense.
I know how many guns I have. I know the Feds have more. Therefore give them their pound of flesh before they show up with the myriad of guns.
Even paying cash. Unless the establishment offers a cash discount, you’re paying inflated credit card induced compensatory pricing.
It’s a real shame banks received 2-5% of most transaction for what costs them pennies. Sure, there are benefits, but their ask isn’t covering it.
Which is especially weird for the country that fought the cold war to show the supremacy of capitalism; a system that is based on market actors knowing the price and value of every product and service offered and making rational purchase decisions based on that.
Capitalism can't work without information asymmetry when it comes to pricing.
Don't get me started on dark patterns! I think the fact that we create them should be something we discuss.
But I think we need to up our game in this cat and mouse game a bit. For example, in aggregators -- like Expedia or Google Flights, etc -- why not try to capture some of these fees in the price? I can search for hotels with parking but what about sorting hotels by price and including the parking price? It's hard to compare when I see a $120 hotel that has a $50 valet vs a $150 hotel that includes parking. But that's the thing I'm actually after a lot of times. Or similar with flights and baggage fees. We should be able to collect a lot of this type of information and properly present it to the users and try to make these types of dark patterns ineffective (still will be cat and mouse and this is only a specific type of pattern, but still, I think there are things we can do)
Probably an opportunity there to gather and expose that data, same as how flight aggregators like orbitz twenty years ago started showing prices inclusive of taxes and fees.
Hiding blatant fraud behind the label of “convenience”. Every industry. Pay for Amazon prime to get 2 day shipping “for free”. Item arrives in six days. Prime does not get refunded.
Pay +10% for “priority” rides in Lyft, supposed to arrive in 1-5 minutes, whereas “regular” is 7-15. Car shows up in 18 minutes. Priority payment does not get refunded.
Honestly what’s even the point in caring anymore. Living in America is about getting grifted until you can hopefully figure out your own grift. The irony of posting this thought on this website is intentional.
Yes. Frank reynolds in the popular television show it’s always sunny in Philadelphia lays it out in plain terms on one of the episodes. “In America you’re either the duper or the dupee”. PT Barnum also knew this essential truth about our nation.
It's strange from a foreigners perspective because all of this looks exactly like a dark pattern made to distract and confuse gambling addicts. Why does American government allow direct predation on its own citizens?
Did they manage to get AWS to provide some mechanism to get an up-front price in your country? That’s pretty neat if so.
I think lots of people go along with these as-you-go services because they’d rather deal with an unexpected bill, than having their servers shut off.
Less advanced economies have discovered this pricing innovation, but are generally not able to scale it beyond hostess bar scams and the like :)
Dont forget the runaway interest that accumulates on the credit you used to pay for it. It really never ends. The IRS even has a few pitfalls that allow you to pay taxes you don't really owe, that can't be refunded.
Maybe that's why credit cards are so extremely popular in the US? I suppose if you never know how much you're going to pay for anything, it helps to have a buffer between the vendor and your bank account, allowing you to review the charges after the fact, and should you dispute some, be on a somewhat even playing field with the vendor.
This is precisely why I stick to dedicated servers for my own personal projects.
$40/month for a machine, doesn't get any more predictable than this.
There's no way you're getting a machine for $40/month. :-)
Did you mean a dedicated VM or VPS?
(I have a bunch of actual dedicated machines with different providers, and this would save me a lot of money.)
(Edit: holy moly those prices are fantastic!)
Yeah, Hetzner has 20 vCPU 64GB RAM i5-13500 servers for $40/mo:
https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ex/
This is ~10x cheaper than the closest AWS option, and without the extra fees.
Also of note that Hetzner is profitable, which means AWS has been operating at an insane markup.
You can also evidence of this on their 10-Q :^)
If you think offering a cloud service is at all the same as offering someone a box in a rack, I invite you to compete in the space.
It's more than a box in a rack. These providers do actively monitor and fix these boxen. They can all be rebooted remotely as if you physically hit the button, you've got interfaces to access the machine as if you were logging in physically with a DB-9/RS232/ethernet/whatever console, etc.
It's not just "space in a rack and you deal with the servers yourself and you come to fix them if they break".
These companies know what they're doing.
You're missing the point. There's a massive difference between getting a box service, and getting a highly available regionally distributed service with a semblance of a SLA of bandwidth to anywhere on the planet. To quote a former manager, its not even apples and oranges, is apples and pumpkins. They simply aren't in any way the same scope.
What do you mean? The big bare metal providers have multiple datacenters with fat pipelines and peering. You can put those geo-separated servers in the same subnet. Europe and US is covered, it looks like Asia a black spot for Hetzner, I will give you that. I doubt that so many business have such size and global reach, that world wide latency is a priority. If it would be, the average site would not connect to 20 domains to load megabytes of javascripts, trackers and what not.
(Also, at Hetzner you can even rent their network hardware if you want to make custom solutions.
Sure, go build your own less reliable cloud. But don't pretend that single box pricing is comparable to single cloud service as a result.
I don’t know why you are suggesting that people will build unreliable things. My company’s first day of AWS was the first time AWS had a major outage. We were sold on more reliable, but I can tell you AWS is just as reliable as home grown BS, if not less reliable. The biggest difference is what you do during downtime: in AWS, you refresh status pages. In your actual hardware, you’re actually problem solving and able to build/deploy workarounds to get back working within 30m.
Having worked for one of the major cloud providers in the past, I second this.
In fact, I have no idea why people go for those. You pay a massive premium for the "privilege" of not owning the infrastructure, and being subject to opaque pricing and outages that are completely beyond your control.
And in terms of actually managing the stuff, now you have to pay staff to manage your cloud things too.
It makes no sense to me.
Hetzner does have a cloud VPS option, which is still very affordable: https://www.hetzner.com/cloud
This is pretty heads-to-heads with EC2, in terms of how it works behind the scenes.
So go with hetzner?
Already do :-)
Hetzner is actually offering their Hetzner Cloud and it's a joy to work with because of its simplicity (think about the early days of AWS). You can do everything in Terraform or via their CLI if you prefer. Setting up a full k8s cluster takes maybe 10 minutes including all configuration.
Yeh but a pragmatic decision like a $40pcm box won't go down well with your now very bored team of SREs, DevOps and distributed systems engineers(tm) who demand more playtime with the magic cloud toybox (for a 100DAU internal app).
You guys have teams that decide the infra they run ?
If they manage it in my company at least of course, the real question is if they want to manage it (and know what that means). Usually they don't, in my experience.
Is there anything stopping those teams from deploying k8s and every possible apache product onto these machines?
There's also middle ground in the form of Digital ocean's kubernetes which runs noticeably cheaper than big tech cloud offerings.
Those people will actually be grateful they don't have to deal and spend weeks to debug yet another cloud provider hidden gotcha or bug and convince support they are right. They will now very happy as they can now deliver value (at relative scale) and really speed up processes. I know I am.
Good ol' bare metal is real nice, but it won't save you from application complexity, security requirements, and so on - you still need to manage it somewhat. If you're not a startup looking for market fit at least.
I'm not sure about that. We get paid well for working with (or around) public cloud complexity, but I bet many of us would gladly manage much simpler setups like the Hetzner Cloud.
Dang, that is a fantastic deal. The €100 / month is even better - DDR5 RAM, 2TB NVME raid 1, and it's all customizable too. Just have to wait for Ubuntu 24.04 to be available and might have to make this switch.
Just setup two Ubuntu 24.04 servers in last couple of days. One at Hetzner and another on AWS.
Yeah, they're all pretty fantastic. Can even upgrade existing servers with more RAM/disk, or store ~250 TB of data for $400/mo etc.
Not to mention unlimited free 1 Gbit egress/server
And this is just for the "dumb" EC2 instance, the markup on their "smarter" stuff is probably much higher. In general I understand why one would want to start off in the cloud but staying there for 10+ years is quite absurd given the costs.
OVH and Hetzner have offerings at that price range. you can use a tool like serverhunter.com to find all sorts of economically-priced servers.
Does OVH asks for passport verification too, like Hetzner?
Why would they ask for a passport? Many people don't even have one.
The worst part is they ask for it after you have enter your credit card details. Maybe they have policies per geographic region for this.
Yep, I'm renting two servers from Hetzner; have one in Germany and another in Finland. Both cheap (€40/month) and over the few years I've been using their services, I have nothing to complain about.
Also a dedicated VM is /literally/ a dedicated machine. It's in the name!
A dedicated virtual machine is a kind of dedicated machine, sure. Like a private community swimming pool is a kind of private swimming pool.
I've got a dedicated machine for $30/month. It's ancient, a xeon L5640 with 16 GB ram, and 1 TB spinning disk, but it's dedicated and it works great. Well actually, the first one stopped working well, and I got a replacement with double those specs for the same price; and the second one is working great. I also run with full disk encryption, because I don't trust their opsec on wiping drives, so that's a bit of a hassle to reboots, I have to get a console with IPMI and put in the disk password, although I saw something [1] last night that inspires me to consider the possibility of automation.
I recommend shopping at https://lowendbox.com/ and https://lowendtalk.com/categories/offers
[1] https://github.com/emtiu/freebsd-outerbase
OVH's so you start and server4you offer dedicated machines for around that price. For personal projects they work great
I'm renting a box from Hetzner - 4x 22tb HD, 2x 1.5TB NVME SSD, Ryzen 3600, 64gb ecc ram... for 100$ per month! It's nice :)
Oh you can!
I've got several dedicated servers at OVH. My absolute cheapest one is an "ECO" / Kimsufi (Kimsufi is a company which spun out of OVH then, a few years later, back into OVH) which I pay... 5 EUR / month. 6 EUR / month with VAT (so 6.5 USD per month).
Sure, it's not beefy at that price: an Atom N2800 with 4 GB or RAM but it is a dedicated server with its own IPv4 IP (yup, there can be uses for that).
I mostly use it as a jump host / reverse-ssh-with-a-known-fixed-IP thinggy.
They've got great dedicated servers at very good price and they're not the only ones in that space.
These can be rebooted/reinstalled remotely and they're monitored: OVH shall deal with hardware failure, if any, for you (never had any so far).
If you rent a dedicated server from AWS, you will be hit for various additional fees which will likely dwarf that $40/month.
So the issue here is not really shared vs dedicated instances. The issue here is that a particular cloud provider (namely AWS) has set up an opaque fee structure.
I suspect they're not getting a dedicated server from Amazon. Anyone doing that is either foolish or is so locked into AWS infrastructure that it cost-wise makes more sense than to expand a network to another provider. Fun times, indeed.
What I started doing is just running my own "cloud" out of my house for personal projects. I have all of the things I need. There's some overhead in terms of maintenance and up-front setup cost in terms of time and equipment, but after that it's pretty smooth sailing.
If it's literally called a dedicated server, why would you suspect otherwise?
Source: I worked in the core EC2 dataplane for a couple years. PEs and leadership there would not be happy with misleading customers. We constantly thought of the customer experience there.
I think you misread the comment you responded to.
It didn’t mean ”I suspect that what they are getting from Amazon isn’t a dedicated server”.
Rather it meant ”I suspect that they’re getting a dedicated server from somewhere else that isn’t Amazon”.
The original comment was talking about a dedicated machine for personal projects with a fixed cost of $40/month.
Ah, this makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!
Generally you get a "dedicated host" from AWS, not a "dedicated server" so that was kind of my first tip off. There's a very big difference; the only usecase I'd really consider for dedicated hosts is security related and, frankly, they're far more expensive than any colo box. Dedicated Hosts are also far more restrictive than what you get at a colo DC. Second, even if AWS offered to let you have full control of a rack box you'd have to be economically out of your mind with AWS' network costs compared to a colo DC.
You still have network performance limitations + the security aspects to run by yourself (as in: not getting your data drive encrypted by a ransomware)
I probably wasn't explicit enough with "cloud" but I mean running your own isolated workloads with at minimum virtual machines and virtual isolated storage (block or otherwise). From a topological perspective my home DC resembles most major clouds other than the fact that there are not two sites.
Who, in their right mind, goes for a bare metal to AWS, when there are so many decent and time-tested options out there?
Data Gravity. If you already have all your data in AWS, and your app that is generating new data is in AWS, it makes a lot of sense to get bare metal in AWS to do batch workloads on that data, so there is no egress fees.
We did a calculation in my previous company and it turned out even with the egregious egress costs it was way cheaper to host these huge workloads outside of AWS.
crypto hft
Anyone who has experience with AWS or is looking to hire candidates with known skills. AWS is the industry standard. A lot of quality candidates know it and use it, because it pays the best and has the most job opportunities. And most companies use it because they were first to market and its easy to find candidates.
I'd argue that startups should have a good reason for not using AWS. The costs for their basic services is not that much compared to the cost of development.
In my experience, when people say "dedicated server" they typically mean something like OVH rather than a real "cloud" provider (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc.). In other words, something morally equivalent to colo but without having to ship servers around.
Yes, that is likely the case here as well. But if someone is not well versed in cloud providers and reads these comments, they might be misinformed without clarifying that this issue is AWS vs other providers, as opposed to dedicated vs shared resources.
You can get much cheaper dedicated servers with alternative providers such as OVH.
Oh no, I would never go AWS for dedicated. Should've specified that in my comment so people don't get disappointed if they try to get that from AWS.
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think that's intentional. I think it's just a byproduct of trying to build something that works for everyone and every use case.
As you make your target market bigger and bigger, you continually hit edge case after edge case that you try and solve with "just one more" rule or option. Eventually the system becomes so complex that no layman can understand it.
So you're saying that they can't implement a hard limit, yet are able to provide hard-limited trials / student credits? It's impossibly hard to believe they couldn't implement the pre-paid model
would you want your services to just turn off when a certain threshold is hit? If so, this problem is solved, set an alarm when cost hits X, use that alarm to trigger a Lambda to turn off the unwanted infra. AWS provides all the tools you need, you just need to use them.
Yes. Turning off is exactly what I want.
Generally, using cost reporting directly doesn't work due to the delay in reporting of the costs.
This problem should be solved with a simple form in the billing area, not a solution that probably requires upwards of 40h of work to set up and properly test to a level I would trust it with anything. Even then it's dependent on delayed cost reporting with unknown failure modes. It merely makes a best-effort at containing the costs and it doesn't actually limit them.
Yes, but I want this lambda to be written and run by Amazon. This was requested already in the first days ow AWS, they literally said they understand it is important for us and will work on it, and then stopped replying about this issue for many years, in spite of people asking for it and voting for it all the time. They know perfectly well what is going on and decided not to do it for business reasons.
Was it "I didn't understand it and/or put in the effort to understand it first" ? Nah it must be "theres a conspiracy to make it confusing so we pay more"
AWS has one of the nicer to comprehend billing systems.
Is there a pre-paid option?
Yes. AWS Advance Pay.
I couldn't find a list of "eligible charges", also that doesn't seem to mean advance payment would be the only payment option so I couldn't be billed and the service would just stop.. did I miss anything?
No, you didn't miss anything the advance payment is just an additional feature but you still need to give in your CC details so they can charge you if you make a mistake. The usual course of action is to stress out and beg them to forgive you, which they sometimes do, and sometimes don't.
That would make some sense if the edge-cases didnt have 10.000% margin.
I've worked at companies that were spending 6 figures a month on AWS and we had dedicated AWS employees who helped us understand our bill and keep pricing in check. We also had GCP and Azure reps constantly reaching out to see if they could win us over by showing us how they could lower our bill. Overcharging enterprise customers for things they're not using is actually a risk to AWS as it gives customers a reason to jump ship.
The whales on AWS aren't overspending because AWS uses the granularity of their billing to make sure they aren't. That's how they keep the whales happy.
For the little guys, I'm not even sure it's worth AWS's time to nickel and dime them. AWS hands out thousands to ten of thousands of dollars in credits like candy. I'm pretty sure it's more important to them to lock in whales when they're still minnows than to bilk an extra $500 a year out of a 10 person start up.
Idk about that, it becomes worse at larger scales. We're at 7 figures weekly with obscene amounts of waste. But at that scale it's like hundreds of Aws bills to understand.
Is anyone dedicated to working on optimization?
My go to line here is that Cloud was a ZIRP. Like the whole entire thing. Took us ~10 years to wind up the cloud, and it will take years to unwind it, but the mass migration away is already happening.
To be clear, I don't mean like AWS is going out of business or anything. Just that companies are a) realizing how insanely expensive it is, b) realizing how wildly volatile the pricing is, and c) starting to reach for services with transparent, fixed pricing
This is Hacker News echo chamber stuff. There is certainly no mass migration away from the cloud. Yes, I personally saw companies in the 2010s say "we're moving everything to the cloud!" without adequate planning or cost analysis and then saying "OK, everyone off the cloud" once they got an insane cloud bill.
But cloud costs can be managed, and for many, many companies the cost of hiring people to manage all this infrastructure and services is usually way more than a well-managed cloud project. Also, the canonical rationale I see on HN for moving away from the cloud is "I can just rent a box for $X/month". If all you're using the cloud for is a dumb, static set of compute, I agree that you can probably do it cheaper on your own. I know hardly any companies (from small startups to large enterprises) who use the cloud that way.
Yea, this is the line that everyone uses. I've worked at these companies, and the reality just doesn't line up with that. You end up still needing your whole Ops team, they're just building cloud tooling instead of on-prem tooling.
As to whether or not the migration away is happening...major cloud providers are already seeing people leave, and profits starting to contract. It's very early. Like I said in the original post, it took us a long time to wind up the cloud and it's going to take a long time to come back to reality.
Something roughly cloud-shaped will probably always remain..there are some legit use cases especially for companies that have spiky load profiles. I don't mean we're literally going back to running servers out of our IT closets. I just mean that as a whole we're going to be moving back to simpler deployments, simpler architectures, and most importantly, fixed/predictable costs.
That I can definitely agree with, I just believe that's fully possible to do with cloud (for the most part, though there are certainly some head turners like the recent news that AWS was charging for forbidden attempts on private S3 buckets, which is bonkers) and cloud cost management tools.
Yea that’s totally fair. I think we’re using slightly different definitions of “cloud” here. I’m mainly focused on the managed services/abstractions, things that abstract away the server itself and are usage based billed. But firing up a few ec2 instances is still technically “the cloud”, you are right.
No, not HN echo chamber. 83% of CIOs want to move workloads back to on-prem or private cloud.
https://x.com/michaeldell/status/1780672823167742135?s=46&t=...
I would take that with a giant tub of salt:
1. As the saying goes, talk is cheap. It's one thing to ask "What do you plan to do?" vs. what you actually do. Look at revenue graphs for AWS, Azure and GCP over the past 5-10 years, right up until the end of 2023. They are definitely not shrinking.
2. I'd be more than a bit skeptical of the messenger, given that Dell obviously has a vested interest in telling people they need to buy more servers.
3. Even if you take what the surveyed CIOs say at face value, asking "Are you planning to move some workloads back to private cloud/on-prem from public cloud" is totally consistent with what I said. There was rush of "just put everything on the cloud" without thinking through it strategically. But just because you're pulling back on a few ill-thought-out cloud projects doesn't mean that overall industry-wide public cloud investment isn't still skyrocketing.
I don't think people understand how absurd egress costs are. I was talking with some people in game dev because im making a multiplayer game and i wanted to understand what my future costs would be. Bandwidth was #1 over compute.
Yeah it's more than absurd. I have a rented server that does 230TB egress a month. That's 4710$ in AWS egress fees (0.02$ per GB). I pay 40 Euros or about 0.0002 per GB and that includes an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 with 64GB RAM.
May I ask who your provider is?
That's https://mevspace.com/ but hetzner, scaleway, ovh, psychz.net, reliablesite.net etc. have similar pricing. If you increase your budget to 100 there are many, many more in Europe and the US.
Thanks!
I've done a decent amount of research on the cheapest VPS providers for network-heavy applications. Take a look at Hetzner and OVH if you haven't already. Also here's a useful comparison:
https://getdeploying.com/reference/data-egress
We really need laws that allow customers to set a legally-binding max spend per month on any service, after which it's upto the company to suspend services.
This should apply to everything -- cloud compute, healthcare, phone bills, internet services, everything.
You sort of have that already in the US for health, its tied to your insurance and its called max out of pocket. Of course it only applies to covered services, and insurance companies and medical providers don't necessarily make it simple to know what is and is not covered (though it IS improving).
If you plan on seeking medical services without going through insurance, the ACA requires providers to provide you with a good faith estimate upfront.
F that, if I paid for insurance I shouldn't have to pay anything out of pocket
F that, if there is any out of pocket payments at all, I should be entitled to estimates even WITH insurance and they should be legally mandated to be within 5% of the actual cost.
That's not how insurance works, bud. For one, you likely don't pay for insurance, its heavily subsidized by your employer, and they will determine which policies to offer you. For two, you share the risk with everyone else who has a policy with your provider.
I could see an argument for insurance companies being legislated to force them to cover more previously uncovered services, as the ACA did.
Sure, you are welcome to contact your insurance BEFORE you obtain services and find out what they will cover. In fact, its incumbent upon you to do that, and not expect HCP's to do that for you.
Had experience with that too. Insurance company will not give you a straight answer as to what’s covered or not- as for example the anesthesiologist may be out of network and you’ll never know until it’s too late. The health care provider won’t give you that info either. So you end up rolling the dice and hoping it all is covered at the end of the day.
Are you sure you don't make this up? Any insurance that I've ever had always let you search if a particular provider is in their network. I just verified on the website of my current insurance. Dozen of anesthesiologists nearby are listed. In fact they often go out of their way to notify you if your doctors leave their network.
So let’s say I want to book an outpatient surgical procedure. I know my surgeon is in network and the facility I visit for the procedure is in network. However there are always other services required that you may not be aware of - anesthesiologists are the most common. This is a very common occurrence which I have encountered (thanks for calling me a liar).
See for example https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/ho49d5/ane... - first hit of many for “anesthesiologist out of network”
Especially if you have an emergency surgery it’s not like you’re picking your anesthesiologist from an approved list before entering the OR, even if you took the time to make sure the hospital you visited is in network.
Finally look at the fine print for your insurance company’s website. You’ll see multiple disclaimers noting that the information may not be accurate - for example from blue cross blue shield:
Then when you call the provider to confirm, they shunt you back to your insurance provider. It’s hilarious if it didn’t have significant financial consequences.
I suppose I just got lucky, using my primary doctor to refer me to services, and doing the research to find which referral docs were covered.
Oddly enough, I had the exact opposite experience recently, doc's billing dept said specific medical appliance would not be covered so I had to pay out of pocket, only to find out later it was reimbursed by insurance and I got refunded for my out of pocket cost.
That is truly funny. I have literally spent an hour across multiple agents to quote a single service out of pocket. I’ve done it multiple times across several providers. Every time it’s the same painful procedure where nobody can ever give you an answer.
I struggled to find the words to describe the way you’re treated when you ask for a quote. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s like shopping at a luxury store with no price tags- if you dare ask the question “how much does this cost?” perhaps you don’t belong here.
Complicated cost calculations are only a part of the issue. You (or your team) also have fault in that you did not take the time to understand the costs associated with your decisions and not utilize AWS cost management capabilities (that is assuming you did get a surprise bill in lieu of an alert saying you hit a budget threshold).
And that is in part due to the shift from having dedicated ops teams, to having programmers take on more infrastructure tasks. This isn't unique or novel--incorrectly configured buckets, committing access keys, poor IAM setup, etc happen so frequently due to devs who have no real practical experience managing production infrastructure having unchecked access to AWS.
Well, all the infra people did this too, just earlier.
The other way EFS will bite you is if you don't have enough provisioning and you push changes to prod that make it throttle to a point where it doesn't work and then you're making emergency changes from a hotel room on vacation.
I don't think that's AWS explicit business model, but I think they're perfectly fine with it happening.
This is patently not true. AWS is very transparent with the pricing and offers a cost calculator. Specifically for EFS, you could have used the EFS service cost calculator before setting off with your endeavours:
https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator/EFS
Other services are available at https://calculator.aws/
Any work on any cloud platform has an imperative step: the cost analysis. Once constituents of the solution are finalised (step 1), it is compulsory to proceed to step 2: estimate the charges it is going to cost and decide whether it is affordable or not. Skipping the step 2 and blaming the cloud platform provider business model is not fair and is akin to overspending on a credit card and blaming the credit card issuer for allowing you to do it.
Cloud is not dissimilar from UNIX/Linux – both give one a large variety of elaborate footguns to shoot oneself with, and if they worked as root on a software development project on a UNIX/Linux box and accidentally wiped the root file system out, who is to blame? Since cloud charges are usage based («pay as you go»), the cost estimate is a requisite that can't be avoided unless the budget is unlimited.