Can confirm. Default ElastiCache clustering option chooses an extremely high compute node, I ended up accidentally spending $1300 in a month just for testing some Redis clustering script. The minimum option ends up only costing a few dozen dollars a month. The billing alert did not even trigger until the very end of the month, so I got a $1300 surprise. I complained about it to AWS, mentioning how misleading their shit was, and they ended up refunding me $800. Still -- a $500 mistake anyone could make at 11pm. They also made it extra clear in their response that they are not legally obligated to refund me, and that they were doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.
AWS console is some next level outdated shit that needs to be improved. GCP's console is way cleaner IMO. I really hope AWS fixed this after this happened to me, but somehow I doubt they did.
Felt like a complete idiot, I guess I'm not smart enough to use AWS's UI in a safe way. When we start trusting tools, we inevitably become complacent. Some user flows are designed to be gotcha's. A little gotcha machine that generates |cost - refund| revenue. They gotcha, and there's nothing you can do about it but beg them for a (usually partial) refund. The refund is the thing that makes you feel better about it.
Thats exactly the impression I got when I was reading the AWS docs. I am a student too and was evaluating AWS for a hobby project.
Reading the docs I got the feeling that the product is designed for big cooperations only. But not for someone who wants real price control. The free account just made no sense to me.
I ended up renting a cloud server ~3€ a month. (Not AWS) Looking at this thread this was the best decision I could make.
AWS console is some next level outdated shit that needs to be improved. GCP's console is way cleaner IMO. I really hope AWS fixed this after this happened to me, but somehow I doubt they did.