When I saw an official "Free Plan" that is automatically deleted after six months, I thought that was a good move: now students could open an account, experiment for absolutely free for six months without the fear of unplanned costs being charged on their credit card, either when experimenting or months/years later because they forgot about their account and some hacker managed to get access to it.
But according to the FAQ "Why do I need to provide payment method to sign up if I’m on the free plan?", it seems you still have to provide a payment method.
So, technically, during the six months lifespan of your "Free Plan" account, you still can end-up being charged for some services, if you go over you $100(+$100) "free" credits.
Unless they have an absolute hard limit on the services you can use under a "Free Plan" making it impossible to go over your $100(+$100) credits; but that would be a first and people would ask to have the same ability to put those limits on a regular account...
So I see some progress, but it seems that it's not as safe of an offering as it should be for a "Free Plan".
But they'll say their favorite line which is that it can be very disruptive to customers for them to stop the spend, how could they possibly know what to stop in your account?? Always easy to find reasons to explain something when the result is more money for you.
Once they need to stop your spending, the following has to happen
- VMs deleted, along with all the files on them
- S3 buckets emptied
- DNS queries no longer getting answered
- Databases dropped, backups deleted
This is not just something disruptive that can be fixed by spending money again. Even if you stop customer traffic, all these resources are still used and cost money.
For a professional account this is insane. And even for a student account this would be a very bad day. I'd hate for this to happen as a student, because I had a bunch of important stuff there when I was a student.
VMs shut down, deleted after a specified time period (7 days, whatever, the exact time period doesn't matter)
>- S3 buckets emptied
S3 buckets no longer accessible, emptied after a specified time period
>- DNS queries no longer getting answered
Yep, fine
>- Databases dropped, backups deleted
Database access revoked, backup access revoked, deleted after a specified time period.
There is no reason this has to be an immediate deletion. Heck, even if you request they delete something they probably don't do it immediately and just mark it "deleted" until it's cleaned up after time.
If the only choices are "my data gets deleted", or "$1,000 dollar bill", I think most students would choose data deleted.
And the whole "we are nice, we will waive bills for beginners who make mistakes" is in my experience, as a computing professor who has had multiple students hit this, not true. They seem to do waive fairly randomly to my eye, about a third of the time.
At $work there are plenty accounts where this would be acceptable. Annoying perhaps, but nothing that couldn't be recovered in a day would be lost. Reliable cost caps would be especially useful when running stuff with admin permissions and the dependencies don't have airtight supply chain security.
None of those things need to happen. (Unless you get billed by the individual DNS query?) The cost of storing things that already exist is known perfectly in advance. It is trivial to include the cost of "maintain everything until the end of the month" in your estimate of how much the customer has already spent. Then, when the spending halt occurs, nothing needs to be deleted because that was already accounted for.
If you go with a paid plan and only consume the "always free" services, then I guess it's still basically free? Except perhaps for any paid service you absolutely cannot opt out of for your use case.
Ah well, there's always LocalStack for test environments.
It's known to be pretty sketchy in terms of who can actually get it. Their new user procedure is a super slow web app that refuses to create a user for opaque reasons, the most reliable of which seemingly being your location. In other words, a lot of people who want it cannot get it.
As another advocate for Oracle Cloud, I think people primarily aren't aware of it, and if they are they are put off by Oracle's reputation, even though Oracle Cloud is no worse than AWS/GC/Azure.
Signing up for services with a notoriously complex pricing structure, under the auspices of a company that is infamous for auditing its customers and forcing more money out of them on the basis of technicalities under threat of legal action, seems... unwise... to me.
(an AWS bill has about 10 pages of items you get charged for, with only 3 line items explained what they are, and even then, not why you get charged. GCP is better, but not by much (let's call it about 4 pages), and Azure is again better, but also not really (2 pages). AND they're all at least 10x as expensive as colo or dedicated hosting. Yes, 10x. People will deny that, and then you look at charges for data traffic, and conclude that if you use a lot of data traffic, it'll quickly start being more than 10x more expensive. And even cheap dedicated is only cheaper than a box in the corner of your closet for 6 months, maybe a year)
Honestly, if they really cared about devs, they would increase their enterprise support contract prices by 0.01% and have a “solo-dev tier” be free forever…
For students to learn effectively, they need a safe harbor. The most critical offering for learners on AWS is a free or prepaid account tier that completely eliminates the risk of surprise bills, allowing them to focus purely on their education.
If the free forever portion includes a t4g.small, 1 aurora, a 10 GB S3 bucket, that would be perfect.
That’s exactly what would make AWS sticky. A safe harbor for students to learn and build solutions using AWS without a surprise $400-$5000 bill. One experience like that, and you’ll be shopping on Newegg for a closet rack.
Not an issue for many of us, other than possible issues with export restrictions, then again that applies to any US based technology now, if the administration keeps getting creative. They went after penguins after all.
Really wish that GCP had a AWS lightsail equivalent offering. I'd happily make use of services like GCS and PubSub for my personal projects if they did, but I can't justify the GCE cost
> The Free Tier has no end date, but Google reserves the right to change the offering, including changing or eliminating usage limits, subject to 30 days advance notice.
It's been available for as long as I can remember GCP existing. Obviously no company will or even could guarantee something like this will be provided forever.
I’m calling out more LLM force-feeding! Why are rich corporations so hell-bent on replacing humans? Does Jeff Bezos think he will rule the Machines after they get rid of the plebeians?
The morbidly greedy cede nothing when they can gain more money and power, and they're so far removed from the needs and plight of the rest of humanity because they've probably haven't seen, much less talked to, anyone more than one rung down on the socioeconomic strata in decades. Whatever happens to the "little people" or the planet is fine, and isn't their concern.
When I saw an official "Free Plan" that is automatically deleted after six months, I thought that was a good move: now students could open an account, experiment for absolutely free for six months without the fear of unplanned costs being charged on their credit card, either when experimenting or months/years later because they forgot about their account and some hacker managed to get access to it.
But according to the FAQ "Why do I need to provide payment method to sign up if I’m on the free plan?", it seems you still have to provide a payment method. So, technically, during the six months lifespan of your "Free Plan" account, you still can end-up being charged for some services, if you go over you $100(+$100) "free" credits.
Unless they have an absolute hard limit on the services you can use under a "Free Plan" making it impossible to go over your $100(+$100) credits; but that would be a first and people would ask to have the same ability to put those limits on a regular account...
So I see some progress, but it seems that it's not as safe of an offering as it should be for a "Free Plan".
But they'll say their favorite line which is that it can be very disruptive to customers for them to stop the spend, how could they possibly know what to stop in your account?? Always easy to find reasons to explain something when the result is more money for you.
Once they need to stop your spending, the following has to happen
- VMs deleted, along with all the files on them
- S3 buckets emptied
- DNS queries no longer getting answered
- Databases dropped, backups deleted
This is not just something disruptive that can be fixed by spending money again. Even if you stop customer traffic, all these resources are still used and cost money.
For a professional account this is insane. And even for a student account this would be a very bad day. I'd hate for this to happen as a student, because I had a bunch of important stuff there when I was a student.
Why?
>- VMs deleted, along with all the files on them
VMs shut down, deleted after a specified time period (7 days, whatever, the exact time period doesn't matter)
>- S3 buckets emptied
S3 buckets no longer accessible, emptied after a specified time period
>- DNS queries no longer getting answered
Yep, fine
>- Databases dropped, backups deleted
Database access revoked, backup access revoked, deleted after a specified time period.
There is no reason this has to be an immediate deletion. Heck, even if you request they delete something they probably don't do it immediately and just mark it "deleted" until it's cleaned up after time.
If the only choices are "my data gets deleted", or "$1,000 dollar bill", I think most students would choose data deleted.
And the whole "we are nice, we will waive bills for beginners who make mistakes" is in my experience, as a computing professor who has had multiple students hit this, not true. They seem to do waive fairly randomly to my eye, about a third of the time.
> For a professional account this is insane.
At $work there are plenty accounts where this would be acceptable. Annoying perhaps, but nothing that couldn't be recovered in a day would be lost. Reliable cost caps would be especially useful when running stuff with admin permissions and the dependencies don't have airtight supply chain security.
Yes, and I want all of this to happen automatically.
Last time, I had to spent a few hours deleting all the resources one by one, and then double check to be sure nothing was missing.
I did call it didn't I?
None of those things need to happen. (Unless you get billed by the individual DNS query?) The cost of storing things that already exist is known perfectly in advance. It is trivial to include the cost of "maintain everything until the end of the month" in your estimate of how much the customer has already spent. Then, when the spending halt occurs, nothing needs to be deleted because that was already accounted for.
"Why do I need to provide payment method to sign up if I’m on the free plan?"
its also to prevent abuse, from people making a mass account only abusing free tier
yep and you can use aws itself for stuff like billing alerts -> automation to shut things down...
also the free tier is generous because they want attract potential customer, if that offering is "too much burden" then they would axe it
they probably think that 1 year service that you can use rarely is too good
If you go with a paid plan and only consume the "always free" services, then I guess it's still basically free? Except perhaps for any paid service you absolutely cannot opt out of for your use case.
Ah well, there's always LocalStack for test environments.
You'll probably reach Localstack's free-tier's limits sooner than the ones of an AWS Free Plan.
They each have different limits. And LS can run locally, without an Internet access. So at least there is choice.
If AWS could lower their bandwidth prices by 99% it would revolutionize the internet.
No more running on free tier forever. "6-month maximum duration".
But you never could? The free tier has always ended after 12 months.
Hm. Does the "always free" tier remain free after 6 months? [1] Or do you have to pay something to keep the account alive?
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/free/database/?p=ft&z=subnav&...
I have a terraformed 4 node kubernetes cluster with 6GB RAM each running on the oracle cloud free tier.
I don‘t know why people bother with any other cloud if they are free tier level hobbyists.
It's known to be pretty sketchy in terms of who can actually get it. Their new user procedure is a super slow web app that refuses to create a user for opaque reasons, the most reliable of which seemingly being your location. In other words, a lot of people who want it cannot get it.
As another advocate for Oracle Cloud, I think people primarily aren't aware of it, and if they are they are put off by Oracle's reputation, even though Oracle Cloud is no worse than AWS/GC/Azure.
Signing up for services with a notoriously complex pricing structure, under the auspices of a company that is infamous for auditing its customers and forcing more money out of them on the basis of technicalities under threat of legal action, seems... unwise... to me.
> notoriously complex pricing structure
You mean AWS?
(an AWS bill has about 10 pages of items you get charged for, with only 3 line items explained what they are, and even then, not why you get charged. GCP is better, but not by much (let's call it about 4 pages), and Azure is again better, but also not really (2 pages). AND they're all at least 10x as expensive as colo or dedicated hosting. Yes, 10x. People will deny that, and then you look at charges for data traffic, and conclude that if you use a lot of data traffic, it'll quickly start being more than 10x more expensive. And even cheap dedicated is only cheaper than a box in the corner of your closet for 6 months, maybe a year)
Cloud services in general was the intended reference for the quoted words, not a specific provider.
That's more than one free tier account can support. Make sure you're not actually paying for it.
Stop spreading misinformation.
> For Always Free tenancies, this is equivalent to 4 OCPUs and 24 GB of memory.
https://docs.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/FreeTier/freetier...
Is it not allowed to be mistaken?
looks like an attempt by them to stop gaming the system
Honestly, if they really cared about devs, they would increase their enterprise support contract prices by 0.01% and have a “solo-dev tier” be free forever…
1 t4, 1 Aurora, 10GB bucket, and a dream…
For students to learn effectively, they need a safe harbor. The most critical offering for learners on AWS is a free or prepaid account tier that completely eliminates the risk of surprise bills, allowing them to focus purely on their education.
If the free forever portion includes a t4g.small, 1 aurora, a 10 GB S3 bucket, that would be perfect.
I am not holding my breath though.
That’s exactly what would make AWS sticky. A safe harbor for students to learn and build solutions using AWS without a surprise $400-$5000 bill. One experience like that, and you’ll be shopping on Newegg for a closet rack.
If you rack up a big bill at work you don't get a refund , so the students need to learn finops the hard way too
Didn’t oracle cloud offer something like that free forever?
Oracle clouds free offerings are very generous. But then your using Oracle.
Not an issue for many of us, other than possible issues with export restrictions, then again that applies to any US based technology now, if the administration keeps getting creative. They went after penguins after all.
> have a “solo-dev tier” be free forever…
i could see a $10/month sub being a thing, but free forever... cmon, you know ppl would abuse the hell outta that.
GCP manages to do it, AWS are just greedy and bad at DX
is the GCP free tier in the room with us now?
in all seriousness, would love a link.
Not many people know this, but Google also makes a search engine!
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features#compu...
Really wish that GCP had a AWS lightsail equivalent offering. I'd happily make use of services like GCS and PubSub for my personal projects if they did, but I can't justify the GCE cost
is the word "forever" in the fine-print somewhere?
> The Free Tier has no end date, but Google reserves the right to change the offering, including changing or eliminating usage limits, subject to 30 days advance notice.
It's been available for as long as I can remember GCP existing. Obviously no company will or even could guarantee something like this will be provided forever.
[dead]
>> Using Amazon Bedrock playground
I’m calling out more LLM force-feeding! Why are rich corporations so hell-bent on replacing humans? Does Jeff Bezos think he will rule the Machines after they get rid of the plebeians?
The morbidly greedy cede nothing when they can gain more money and power, and they're so far removed from the needs and plight of the rest of humanity because they've probably haven't seen, much less talked to, anyone more than one rung down on the socioeconomic strata in decades. Whatever happens to the "little people" or the planet is fine, and isn't their concern.