I thought I was just to incompetent to figure out how to stop an instance…so I just gave up while watching my creditcard getting billed for about €20 each month..
Last month I went full on and spent a few hours removing everything on every screen I could find.
After many hours of failing to remove an instance because you have to stop a thingie from auto starting on another screen first…and another thingie from running there.
I finally managed to remove all the instances…
Then two months later, I still get a bill for a few €…
This will scan your entire account and list all of your resources - it's actually made for generating CloudFormation templates, but it's very useful for a use-case like yours.
I'll bet you created the environment with Elastic Beanstalk, whose job it is to (among other things) replace instances if they fail.
When you stopped the instance in EC2, EB did its job and created a new instance.
You eventually figured this out and killed the EB env, and the instances stopped reappearing.
But the Elastic IP address assigned to your EB env is still on your account, and it's no longer free of charge, because you don't have a running instance.
So you will be billed about a €/mo until you delete the Elastic IP reservation.
This is ridiculously confusing, and ridiculously common.
Then two months later, I still get a bill for a few €…
I give up.
I Hate Amazon