First of all I am just a Newbie to AWS Cloud infrastructure.
I had some theoretical knowledge in AWS.
So, as the quarticity increased from watching many Youtube videos.
I also started experimenting with AWS VPC setups.
In July, I learnt an important lesson on AWS billing which costed me around $2.14.
It may sound like a tiny amount, but the lesson I learnt is so valuable.
Let me walk you through what happened and how AWS Helped me.
⚙️ The Setup
The project I was working needed a custom VPC with:
- A public and private subnet
- A NAT Gateway for internet access in the private subnet
- An Elastic IP (EIP) allocated for the NAT Gateway
The Architectural diagram of the project.
The project worked fine...
Once I finished with the project. I deleted the Custom VPC manually with all the associated resources that's what I thought.
💸 The Mistake With a Cost
After few days, I noticed some charges in my account which is a free tier account.
I already knew that Custom VPC are not in free tier. So, I expected some charges.
But the Charges started growing day by day when I took a look in Cost Explorer a AWS services to see details about Bills.
It showed Ideal IPv4 charges about $1.24 which is increasing day by day.
In that time Elastic Ip's didn't cross my mind.
The same day itself I was explain about EC2 instances to my friend. I showed the Elastic IP section to her.
In that time only I found about the ideal Elastic IP's in my account which was previously attached to NAT gateways of the custom VPC I just deleted.
I Quicky Released the ip's from my account.
🙋♂️ Contacting AWS Support
Has I Raised a support case explaining the situation that.
- I'm a beginner experimenting with AWS
- This was an unintentional oversight
- I had immediately released and deleted the Elastic IP's after discovering.
Then they asked me some details and some confirmation after I provided all that.
To my surprise, within a short time I received an email confirming:
✅ My entire July bill was waived
✅ There were no dues remaining
✅ The waiver had been applied successfully
Shoutout to Herman from AWS Support — incredibly helpful and understanding my situation.
this whole process took about 3 Days.
🔍 Key Learnings
- Always clean up: Never leave Elastic IPs or NAT Gateways lying around simply.
- Monitor your billing dashboard: Don’t wait until month-end to check your bill's.
- Budget alerts are your friends: Set them up in the Budgets section.
- AWS Support is great: If you're genuine and learning, they really do care you and help you when you stuck in situations like these.
🛡️ My New Teardown Checklist
- ✅ Terminate instances
- ✅ Remove subnets and routing tables
- ✅ Delete NAT Gateways
- ✅ Release Elastic IPs
- ✅ Delete the VPC
I’ve also enabled Billing Alerts to catch anything early.
🧠 Final Thoughts
The cost may have been small, but the lesson was massive.
Cloud services have endless boundaries, but also use responsible.
Billing mistakes can be easily made So use it carefully.
Thanks again to AWS for waiving my charges and supporting my learning journey. 🙏
Have you ever forgotten to delete cloud resources and got charged for it?
Share your experience — let's help each other avoid the same pitfalls!
Top comments (5)
Great write up !!! Thank you for sharing your experience . I will not do this mistake during my course.
Great work nishath!!
Thank you
While exploring AWS for the first time as a newbie, I also faced this issue — I was charged nearly $50 but later got it waived. Thanks for sharing such useful information.
AWS Support really helped us.