Amazon seems to have started to reach even for pennies. I have been a light user of AWS services for the past several years, and my monthly bill was usually below 0.2 USD. They never bothered to take such small amounts from the registered card. Last month's 0.14 USD bill was the first one I had to pay. :)
This is a side note. I've thought about setting up an AWS account just to play around with, what is the likelihood of a senior embedded c/c++ programmer really screwing up and end running up several thousand-dollar bill just because he put an innocuous infinite loop somewhere out of ignorance? :) Is there some trigger you can set such that CPU usage/bandwidth usage won't do something that you will never financially recover from since I won't have any knowledgeable devs to look to.
Anything can happen. AWS gives you tools to manage costs, and bill shock stories are usually told by people that didn’t know about those tools. AWS unofficially gives their customers a once-off bill amnesty (within certain not publicly defined parameters) on the proviso that you set up cost alerting properly. I had to play this card at my current employer when I forgot to scale down an RDS instance. They’re very nice about it.
