
Ask HN: Did your AWS bill literally double from last night? - ent101
I just logged into my AWS account and I noticed every charge has doubled for my September usage, literally overnight!<p>I called AWS and they said this has been reported by multiple people and they still don&#x27;t know how many accounts are affected, did this happen to you too?
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dpeterson
I opened a service ticket. My ec2 instances have somehow been running for over
950 hours in one month. I can go back and see my instances run for 744 hours
(what i'd expect in a month) in previous months. Amazon invented more hours
than actually exist in a month for billing purposes. Bezos is a genius! I
should have thought of that!

~~~
0xmohit
Came across this long back: 2 + 2 = 5 for very large values of 2.

Maybe Bezos read this recently and decided to use large values of 24 to
compute number of hours in a month.

------
donarb
I just received this email from Amazon on Thursday afternoon, this may be
related:

"We are notifying you that we incorrectly issued an early invoice for your
September AWS usage on September 18th. As your card was charged successfully
for this invoice, we are currently processing a refund for the unexpected
charge. The refund generally takes 3-5 business days to be received by your
bank and some banks may require additional processing time. Your full monthly
usage will be invoiced through our normal billing process on or around the 3rd
of October. We will send another notification when your correct September
invoice is available. We apologize for any inconvenience caused by this error.

There is no action required from you, but if you have any questions, please
contact the AWS Customer Service Team by visiting:
[https://aws.amazon.com/support](https://aws.amazon.com/support), and opening
a case by selecting 'Create Case'. You can then select ‘Account and Billing
Support’ , followed by ’Billing’ for the Service, and ‘Charge Inquiry’ for the
Category."

~~~
cortesoft
Yeah, I got the same email.

------
hanoz
Mine is showing as roughly twice what I'd expect it to be on the billing home
page. It looks about right on the cost explorer though.

I got an alert for crossing a billing threshold only five hours ago, as
expected for this time of the month; now the total is just under double that.

It's quite an intriguing error. I'm struggling to imagine how it might have
come about.

~~~
rantwasp
if i had to guess I would say that some usage data was piped through the
billing system twice. Given how may people are experiencing this I hope this
will be fixed in a timely manner.

------
KenanSulayman
Yes, seeing the same on the Billing & Cost Spend Summary; but the correct
amounts are displayed in the AWS Cost Management dashboard [0].

[0] [https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-
reports/home#/dashboard](https://console.aws.amazon.com/cost-
reports/home#/dashboard)

~~~
kumarm
Yes. This is the case for us too. Cost reports is showing accurate
information.

------
gwillen
I was also seeing a surprising cost of about twice what I expected, but since
I rarely use AWS I was assuming I had just calculated it wrong somehow. It's
maddeningly difficult to see your usage history of services -- I still can't
figure out how to see what my EC2 usage was this month. There is something
called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because apparently it takes
24 hours to set up (?), and it's not even clear that it will include my
historical activity when it's ready...

~~~
userbinator
_There is something called the "cost explorer" which I can't use yet, because
apparently it takes 24 hours to set up (?), and it's not even clear that it
will include my historical activity when it's ready..._

Cost Explorer itself also charges per use. I'm not kidding:

[https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-
management/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/aws-cost-management/pricing/)

~~~
brianmathews
The API charges per use, but not the cost explorer dashboard itself.

~~~
jmuhlich
All those dashboards use the APIs underneath. The cost explorer dashboard
certainly does incur API calls on my account.

~~~
brianmathews
no it doesn't

------
meritt
Yes, just saw this too. This is showing across all service types for me.
Anything that is billed based on a unit of time has exactly 2x the consumption
than has happened so far month-to-date.

------
Pfhreak
My website bill rose to exactly double. It's still only a dollar, but that's
twice what I was paying last month!

------
shadiakiki
"isitfit"
([https://isitfit.autofitcloud.com](https://isitfit.autofitcloud.com)) is a
downloadable command-line tool that calculates billed usage of EC2 instances
from the number of running hours over the last 90 days. You could reconcile it
against the EC2 section in your AWS bill. To download it, use `pip3 install
isitfit` and then just run the command `isitfit`. It's free and open-source at
[https://github.com/autofitcloud/isitfit](https://github.com/autofitcloud/isitfit)

Edit: On a side-note, this week is the global climate strike week
([https://globalclimatestrike.net/](https://globalclimatestrike.net/)).
Consider running `isitfit --optimize` to identify underused EC2 instances,
downsize them, and use the saved money to save the planet.

------
captkos
Yeah something is crazy.. I killed a bunch of service content and my cost
STILL seems to be going up.. My bill for this month (even after the reduction)
is going to be almost 85% higher than last month with the same level of
activity.

~~~
lolinder
I wouldn't go killing important servers if I were you. I'm showing a bill for
950+ hours for a bunch of services that I only have one instance of each.
Since that's not possible (there aren't that many hours in a month), and Cost
Explorer has the correct numbers, I'm assuming that there's a mistake that's
causing double-counting on the billing dashboard.

------
iconara
Is anyone still seeing problems like this? I found duplicate entries in our
Parquet CUR reports, but not in the CSV versions (we export both, for
reasons). The duplicates were from 24 September beween 00:00 and 13:00 UTC and
only for Usage and DiscountedUsage. Not limited to EC2, though, it was
Redshift, CloudWatch, and a lot of other services too.

------
johneke
I wonder if AWS is prepping for a pricing hike but someone was trigger happy
with the big red button :D

------
azdacha
This is absolutly not related, but on a funny note, I got subribed to prime
forcefully last month.

I'm highly suspicious toward Amazon behaviour now. This kind or news only
flurish the idea that Amazon has taken it's first steps toward being a total a
__company.

------
cbsks
Whenever I hear news like this, part of me feels bad for all the programmers
working very long hours to fix the problem. You can be sure that a lot of
pagers started to go off as soon as the reports of billing issues started to
come in.

~~~
jagannathtech
'pagers' Now that's a word that I have not heard in a long time...

~~~
cbsks
You can tell that I haven’t worked in an on call position in a while...

~~~
propogandist
PagerDuty makes a lot of money
[https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/pd](https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/pd)

------
captkos
I got a response back and my time was corrected (quick glance).. I will be
more thorough from this point on. But for me the quick and dirty is comparing
to the previous months bill.. Normally is enough, except for this month.

------
hdpq
I'm showing double the amount of hosted zones in Route 53. Kind of odd

------
sashavingardt2
Mine doubled. Got a non sensical reply from AWS. Now back to normal.

------
jared_nyc
Same here. Just checked my Org consolidated bill.

Every service looks to be about double, However if you go to the Cost & Usage
report, it looks right.

------
phyzome
I usually get billed 54 to 58 cents per month. It's showing me 70 cents for
the current month, for a projected 91 cents!

------
guitarnick
We were just about to submit a ticket when the forecast/breakdown returned to
normal. Looks like fixes are rolling out.

------
agotterer
About an hour ago I received a refund receipt from AWS for the extra charge.
So it seems like they are addressing the issue.

------
dgemm
It is a mistake in the billing console.

------
jayzalowitz
Are you at an account anniversary? What does the service broken down billing
say your biggest cost is?

------
edwhitesell
No issues on bills of two orgs I have access to. Cost Explorer shows data as
it should too.

------
raverbashing
I think it might have charged people for free-tier eligible usage as well

I've seen it happen

------
peterburkimsher
We had a problem with malware mining Bitcoin on our AWS instance a few weeks
ago:

[https://www.cybereason.com/blog/new-pervasive-worm-
exploitin...](https://www.cybereason.com/blog/new-pervasive-worm-exploiting-
linux-exim-server-vulnerability)

------
encoderer
Oh no somebody ran the cron job twice.

Call me, aws. I can help. I know cron jobs.

~~~
quickthrower2
Don’t call it that. It’s a Lambda.

------
k__
From 1 to 2€? Maybe...

------
AimForTheBushes
Yep, exactly double.

------
brendanw
Yup, I am seeing double as well.

------
TruffleLabs
Thanks for the heads up. Our AWS costs were definitely up almost 30% for this
month! Checking billing details...

------
cochne
Yep this happened to me.

------
meow_mix
i can't wait for this COE

------
devoply
There was recently an error where AWS send the bill twice and then sent an
apology e-mail. It may have something to do with this.

------
tayleeganj
Lol will have to check for a coe

~~~
human20190310
Is there a word for cloud billing anxiety yet?

I had an AWS account I wasn't using, but I didn't want to get surprised by any
bills, so I set an alert to let me know when the bill was more than $0.

Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see what
kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few cents... for
the alert itself.

I closed it altogether after that. It's better for my sanity to just use a new
email address and sign up again than to worry about surprise bills.

EDIT: It's entirely possible that I set it up wrong, or set up the wrong
thing, but in any case an alert was all I was trying to do, and as far as I
could tell that's what happened. I must admit I rage-quit rather than
investigate too deeply.

~~~
cameronbrown
> Sometime later the alert went off, so I anxiously jumped into AWS to see
> what kind of disaster was happening, and found that I got billed a few
> cents... for the alert itself.

They charge for billing alerts? I've never used AWS in production and I
suppose it's a miniscule cost, but, wow, that seems really pedantic to charge
for that.

~~~
rumanator
AWS is a gigantic exercise in figuring out how to gouge customers. Case in
point: charging API gateways per HTTP request.

~~~
sciurus
I don't necessarily disagree with you, but I don't think that's a strong
example. Charging for utilization is the most obvious way to price a service,
and http requests are the most obvious way to track utilization of an API
gateway (or any load balancer).

~~~
rumanator
Which other service provider puts a price tag on each HTTP request routed
through a reverse proxy?

Some service providers such as Hetzner don't even charge for bandwidth up to
20TB, but somehow AWS found a way to hike the bill per HTTP request.

~~~
oldmanhorton
I've never used AWS so perhaps I'm mistaken, but api gateways normally provide
extra functionality on top of just proxying the request. You can still set up
a server listening on port 80 or 443 with a public IP and make requests to it
without being charged per request.

~~~
aortenzi
You can, and if you want to use Lambdas, you can also route to them from ALBs,
which has a bit confusing of a pricing model for comparison, but has no per-
request cost.

~~~
sciurus
Oh, ALBs. Now that's a mess. You'll either be charged per new connection, per
concurrent connection, per byte, or per rule evaluation, depending on which is
highest any given hour.

[https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/)

~~~
cameronbrown
> Load Balancer Capacity Units

I'm baffled at the complexity of just ELB pricing. Do AWS customers just not
care?

