Obfuscated billing helps Amazon with $350/hour engineers, where an engineer figuring out where $10k is going each year isn't a top priority. Been there, done that.
Obfuscated billing is definitely not there to hit free tier or poor folks. AWS has an awesome reputation for just about everything, and it isn't worth the reputation hit. Free tier is there so that:
* the student in college will pick AWS in their first job
* the random engineer will prototype something on the weekend, and Amazon gets millions of business
* the random pre-funding startup starts building on AWS, and if it goes big, so does the account
And it works. Amazon has made millions based on things I've built on free tier. AWS' problem is that my ONE YEAR free tier ran out probably around a decade ago, and I've long since moved on from what I was doing then. If AWS were to continue to provide me a free tier, the same thing would have happened a few times since.
Obfuscated billing helps Amazon with $350/hour engineers, where an engineer figuring out where $10k is going each year isn't a top priority. Been there, done that.
Obfuscated billing is definitely not there to hit free tier or poor folks. AWS has an awesome reputation for just about everything, and it isn't worth the reputation hit. Free tier is there so that:
* the student in college will pick AWS in their first job
* the random engineer will prototype something on the weekend, and Amazon gets millions of business
* the random pre-funding startup starts building on AWS, and if it goes big, so does the account
And it works. Amazon has made millions based on things I've built on free tier. AWS' problem is that my ONE YEAR free tier ran out probably around a decade ago, and I've long since moved on from what I was doing then. If AWS were to continue to provide me a free tier, the same thing would have happened a few times since.