🔔 ALARM: "BillingAlarm" in US East (N. Virginia) 🔔

When you see this email, you know you've messed up!

This is not the first time I have seen this subject line, but it's the first time for my personal account.

I'm afraid to open this email. How did I end up here!? 🧵

Things are actually not that bad 🤣 But they could be, and that's the point of this thread!

The first thing I did when setting up AWS was define billing alerts... for the low value of $5.

I was not expecting to hit this monthly limit any time soon since all I'm using it for is CI for one of my projects: https://github.com/props-sh/props/

However, it happened! And it made me think, why is that, why the cost?

Once I opened the AWS Billing console, I saw a breakdown by service: Lightsail!?

I played with it about a month ago while looking for options to run a small SMTP service: SMTP service

But I ended up using @hetznercloud.

Surely, I shut down the test container, right?

Whoops! ☹️ Oh well, easy fix!

Here's the moral to this story:

👉 Always define Billing alerts for your Cloud services! 👈

If I hadn't, it would have taken me months to figure this out...

The best part!? This advice works no matter the size of your project!

As an individual, I can't afford to waste money.

As a company, cloud costs can explode pretty fast. 💥

That's all she wrote! I hope you find this helpful!

I'm curious to hear your thoughts and advice or stories from the trenches.

Thanks! 🙏