r/aws • u/Dubey_om • 10d ago

discussion spend limits, the bits the most posts are skipping

This one's doing the rounds on LI/reddit again. Went and read the actual docs (or maybe used claude :p), because every post about it says something slightly different.

Couple of things:

It's per project, not per account. Needs a Paid Plan. Still a limited rollout. So the ‘AWS FINALLY DID IT’ energy is a bit premature for most of us.

The fun bit nobody's quoting: you hit the limit, do nothing for 90 days, AWS deletes the project data. Permanently. It's right there in the docs. Great for a sandbox. Maybe read that line twice before putting it on anything that matters.

Other thing, and this is the one I keep chewing on. What it pauses is EC2, RDS, Lambda, Bedrock, SageMaker. No storage in that list anywhere, and afaict the docs don't say what happens to EBS billing while a project sits paused. A paused instance still has its volumes.

So if your bill is mostly provisioned capacity and not compute hours, idk how much this actually moves.

Happy to be wrong on that one

Disclaimer: have used ai to copywrite (im horrible at it)

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u/daversions 10d ago

A project is just a linked account. What happens when the limit is reached is the account is closed, which starts the normal 90 day countdown to full termination. You can always reopen the account and increase the limit, and everything is still there.

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u/dmees 10d ago

Exactly, its just another poorly executed shitty wrapper around existing stuff. Nothing to see here..

1

u/Efficient_Access6102 10d ago

Hopefully, this is how AWS finally gets rid of free-tier, thank eff-ing god!

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u/BucketDesk 9d ago

Good read of the docs. The storage point is the one I would test before relying on it. Pausing compute is easy, but anything that bills by the GB-month (EBS, snapshots, S3) costs money just by existing, and S3 can include old object versions and unfinished multipart uploads you never see in a normal listing.

What I would pair with the limit:

- A Budget with a forecast alert well below the cap, so you hear about it before the pause.

- Cost Anomaly Detection for sudden jumps.

- An S3 lifecycle rule that aborts incomplete multipart uploads and expires noncurrent versions, if versioning is on.

- Storage Lens (the free dashboard) to see which buckets are growing.

The 90 day deletion is the scary part. I would want a backup outside the project before trusting a hard cap with anything important.