> it’s also not really that hard to set an billing alert in CloudWatch and track spend in Cost Explorer
Billing alerts aren't good enough.
Consider a scenario where you're consulting on someone else's small- or medium-sized project and your bug costs the client a huge amount of money in the middle of the night. Now who pays? Say goodbye to your paycheck or reputation, even though it should have been preventable.
Another scenario: you launch a startup, and a bug empties the bank account and kills the company. If the solution is to just not use things like AWS and GCP (including Firebase, which has no billing cap) when you're getting started, why are they advertised that way?
> AWS isn't perfect but at least you have half a chance of working out what is costing you money through the billing console.
The first few times I used AWS for tutorials, something similar happened to me. I thought I shut everything down, but kept getting billed and wasn't able to find it without contacting them. It was just a few dollars, but I've been wary about any services where you can't cap the billing.
Cloud platforms generally don't let users cap the billing, because those overages are good income for them. I prefer using services like DigitalOcean or Linode where you can be sure that your new site crashes for 15 minutes instead of bankrupting you.
Billing alerts aren't good enough.
Consider a scenario where you're consulting on someone else's small- or medium-sized project and your bug costs the client a huge amount of money in the middle of the night. Now who pays? Say goodbye to your paycheck or reputation, even though it should have been preventable.
Another scenario: you launch a startup, and a bug empties the bank account and kills the company. If the solution is to just not use things like AWS and GCP (including Firebase, which has no billing cap) when you're getting started, why are they advertised that way?