My Simple Mistake Would Have Cost Me Dollars

Everybody is building their own Jarvis these days.
People are running their ClawdBot on Mac minis, servers, and fancy setups.

I thought I will do it properly.
Let me host my own ClawdBot on an EC2 machine.

For that, I was planning to create a new AWS account and use the 12 month free tier.

Later I found out that AWS does not give that old 12 month EC2 free tier anymore.
New accounts now get limited credits like $100, and maybe some extra credits for a short time. That too only for around 6 months.

Only accounts created earlier were eligible for the proper 12 month free tier.

Then I remembered something important.

I Already Had an AWS Account

I remembered that I had created an AWS account long back using my personal email.
Just for testing. Nothing serious.

So I logged into that account.

First thing I checked was billing.

And I saw something unusual.

There was a bill of $0.71.

It was not a big amount, but it did not make sense to me.
I was sure I was not using anything.

Finding the Reason

I opened the bill details and saw that the charge was coming from EC2.

That surprised me because I was not running any server.

Then I checked EC2 instances.

And there it was.

One EC2 instance.
Status: Stopped.

This is where I understood my mistake.

Stopped != Terminated

Long back, when I was new to AWS, I created an EC2 instance just to see how it works. After that, I stopped it.

I thought stopped means finished.

But AWS thinks differently.

If an EC2 instance is stopped, AWS can still charge you for things like storage.
Only compute stops. Billing does not fully stop.

To completely end it, you have to terminate the instance.

So yes, AWS can charge you even if your instance is stopped.

I went back and stopped my instance.

Sorry.
I terminated it.

Uhhhh !!! 😫 Still mixing those words.

One More Mistake: No Billing Alert

There was one more problem.

I never set any billing alert in the AWS console.

So AWS was charging me quietly, and I had no idea.

If I had a billing alert, I would have noticed this much earlier.

This small mistake could have cost me more dollars over time.

Why I Am Writing This

I am writing this to warn you.

Do not assume stopped means free.
Do not forget to terminate unused resources.
And always set billing alerts in AWS.

Even a small mistake can slowly cost you money.

ClawdBot made me log back into AWS.
And that is how it saved my dollars.

Learn from my mistake.