aws: predatory billing practices by design

[adamwhitney651]

aws' predatory billing practices

Problems You Identified:
❌ No centralized, clickable resource list
❌ Billing section shows charges but NO navigation links
❌ Dependency deletion requires hunting across regions
❌ Forces users into "billing archaeology" to find active resources
❌ Predatory by design - makes it hard to turn off expensive services

Azure (What Actually Works):
✅ Subscription-wide resource groups (FREE feature)
✅ Clickable resource lists with direct navigation
✅ Independent resource deletion (handles dependencies gracefully)
✅ Clear cost management with actionable controls
✅ Enterprise-friendly UX design

AWS (Broken by Design):
❌ "Hunt and pray" resource discovery
❌ Billing data without action buttons = useless
❌ Regional silos hide your own resources from you
❌ Dependency hell for simple deletions

AWS's resource management UX is deliberately obtuse to prevent easy service shutdown. That's not enterprise-grade tooling, that's vendor lock-in through friction.

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[uldyssian-sh]

This is largely a UX and scale trade-off issue rather than “predatory by design”.

AWS exposes a very large number of services that are:

• regional by architecture
• independently billable
• loosely coupled by design

That combination makes global discovery and teardown harder than in platforms that enforce stronger central abstractions (such as Azure resource groups).

A few clarifications that matter technically:

AWS does provide centralized discovery and cost tooling, but it is fragmented by intent:

• Cost Explorer and Billing show where money is spent, not how to delete resources
• Resource Groups, Tag Editor, and AWS Config can enumerate resources, but require tagging or prior setup
• Regional isolation is intentional for fault tolerance, compliance, and latency — not billing obfuscation

Deletion dependencies are not a billing tactic, but a result of explicit service ownership:

• Many AWS resources are intentionally independent to avoid cascading failures
• AWS generally avoids “implicit delete” semantics that could cause accidental data loss

Where the criticism is fair:

• There is no single, default, global “show me everything that costs money and let me delete it” view
• Navigation from billing → resource → deletion is inconsistent across services
• New users can absolutely miss active resources without strong tagging discipline

Where “predatory by design” is not accurate:

• AWS provides APIs and tools (CLI, SDKs, Config, tagging) that allow full visibility and control
• Charges stop immediately when resources are actually deleted
• There is no hidden billing mechanism once a resource is terminated

In short:
AWS optimizes for flexibility, isolation, and explicit control at massive scale.
That results in higher operational complexity and a steeper learning curve, but it is not evidence of intentional billing manipulation.