Yes, you can set up a budget but it's only used for alerting. The services will happily keep running and building up to that 1k bill if you miss the alerts or don't react to them.

Those alerts can invoke a Lambda that shuts the service down, which is a ridiculously baroque solution but it's what you get.

Wow, they really made it complex, didn't they? On one hand they advertise how anyone can spin up a VM and connect to it but you still need to do some serverless black magic to keep your budget in check. Anyway, thanks for the heads up. I'll definitely try that out.

The aim of the game is for you to be depending on even more AWS services to help you use the ones you already have

> ridiculously baroque solution

It seems to follow their practice of building the “API first” solution. By the way, a lambda/programmatic solution allows you to disable lower priority resources and retain higher priority resources. It’s a lot of effort, but it’s incredibly flexible.

Additionally billing alarms have a max precision of a day, so if you manage to really screw up you can rack up a huge bill before the alarm goes off.