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Some Recent Invoices
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in General
I frequently spin up a VM, test or check something, and then trash the instance. It's faster to do it on various cloud providers than in my home proxmox and they already have the images/ISOs, etc.
Leads to situations like these.
Comments
Solution: add credit to the account. 10$ by default.
I use docker for this locally 😂
I do the same and get emails like that from vultr, azure and aws lol
For azure and aws its usually an IP or something that was left over.
great management of time usage
Now we've heard this good advice directly from @raindog308!
Most (all?) of the big cloud providers offer a command line interface which, once you get used to it, is faster and easier than the web interface. For example, here's a page about the Google Cloud CLI: https://cloud.google.com/cli
I remember, seems maybe going on twenty years ago, spinning up an AWS instance via command line. It took no time to do it. I left the instance running a little while, and I remember being very amused to see my credit card get billed for eight cents!
I’m surprised they have a payment processor who offers such small amounts without fees making it a net loss
Oh their payment processor fees will make it a net loss for sure. Most of these companies won't let you pay less than $1, so you'd have to pay $1 and then use the leftover cents as credit towards future deployments.
I did something similar in Vultr and got a $0.20 bill. I asked support how to pay it w/o overpaying and they just waived the charge, presumably since the processing fees don't make it worthwhile.
The reason they bill anyway a lot of times, and why Backblaze for example only includes 10 GB for free, making the minimum bill incredibly small (for sure a loss) is the oppurtunity costs.
Don’t bill for 20 GB, or for very small hourly servers, and people might refrain from storing more data or using the product more, in the long-term, resulting in less revenue and profits.
With Vultr I had a few bucks' credit which covered it.
For Linode and Hetzner, I paid those amounts via PayPal. If they'd wanted to round up to a $1 and leave the rest on credit, or wait until it built up to $1, or whatever, but they sent an invoice and I paid the amount it said.
No cloud for me. Principle.
"all the ISOS and stuff available" also holds true for my lab. Well that's easy because I only use BSDs and very few linux distros. If I want to play with/quickly test something exotic, say Minix or HelenOS firing up a Virtualbox instance does the trick.
I think many of us just top up with $5-10 when we get bills like this and use their service now and then.
If the provider has a custom-made billing system, the cost of developing a solution and administrating the unpaid invoices might be more than the payment fees.
Tax and VAT are paid after the invoice date, so a lot of unpaid invoices over time can add up.
And some of them might get the cost covered with late payment fees and/or interest.
In some countries, they are bound by laws to make a credit assessment before giving long-term credit to consumers. And that costs a lot more than a payment fee.
Installing a distro from normal ISO with working console and recovery media is a fun challenge. They’re still VPSes at the end of the day, just with really shitty esoteric tooling
I'm not sure which variant you mean but in case it's mine: Nuh, even virtualbox isn't shitty or esoteric compared to the common webpanels. And for FreeBSD although CLI only (afaik and care) it's even better than GUIs like virtualbox in my view, but I guess that's also a question of personality, experience and preferences.
I mean setting up a VPS style infrastructure on AWS or other major cloud. For pennies per month you can have netboot.xyz and/or your choices of ISOs ready to mount. It's shitty that you have to jump through hoops to use clouds like VPS, but it is possible
Well, as I said I do not use cloud services, not at all, so I'm not in a position to judge that. But my (very few) occasional attempts to look at them were miserable enough to confirm my stance to be the right one (for me).
Also, frankly, when a provider tells me to use netboot.xyz to somehow around 3 corner create/install a VPS I take that to mean "stay away, this is a toybox not a professional service!". But that's maybe just me who looks at linux as just an OS and not something I "invest" in; it has to just work (and not have/use the systemd pestilence).
If a client ever asked me to develop something for a cloud system I'd make it a condition to have their admins set it up and manage it - and that's for a good client whom I like.
This type of invoice, to me, looks like a report on how your money has been used and for what purpose. In Russia, we call this an "act of services rendered". An invoice to top up your account balance, however, is another matter. However, in many Western services, I have not seen any documents similar to our "acts", only invoices.