# Amazon Web Services (AWS) 248 Hacker News commenters recommended Amazon Web Services (AWS) and 498 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 13 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 5 years (17 owners). **Verdict:** Recommended for its broad service ecosystem, strong compliance credentials and instant self-service capacity, but critics warn about lock-in, complex pricing and easy overspending with no spending cap. ## Why people recommend it - Strong compliance and security credentials (4 comments): "Using vendors where you not only have infosec permission, but they are also listed as data processors in our contracts with our customers is the way not to get fired and sued." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48364581)) "The list of compliance standards that AWS meets is so big they have a separate product just to deliver the compliance documents." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48366972)) "Most of the people agreeing to foot the AWS bill do it because they see how much the compliance is worth to them." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46899151)) - Compute on demand, no purchase orders (4 comments): "AWS having opaque billing and the ability to provide a huge amount of compute (even at high cost) at the click of a button" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48501122)) "the massive advantage of AWS is that it allows staff to buy infrastructure without having to raise purchase orders" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48628398)) "it cost a fraction of what we were paying our supplier and that things took minutes to set up rather than weeks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49299922)) - Broad ecosystem of integrated services (3 comments): "I'm paying for the entire ecosystem around it: security and access management, S3, Lambda, networking, monitoring, reliability guarantees" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46055536)) "I get unlimited scalability in AWS. I can standup and run an app for $0-$5/month depending on how I want to build it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49590493)) "It's very hard and costly to replicate what AWS gives you if you have requirements close to enterprise levels." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46055569)) - Widely known, easy to hire for (3 comments): "If you run software on AWS, you can hire someone familiar with AWS and as long as you're not doing anything too weird, they'll figure it out" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45820178)) "It's why I've used AWS for a couple of side hustle projects because I had familiarity from using it at work." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46126180)) "I learned a lot of stuff about networking, how AWS works (VPCs, IAM, CloudWatch, etc) from trial and error" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48501739)) ## What people warn about - Managed services create lock-in (3 comments): "most of the high-value services are increasingly flaky and questionably supported, and nearly all of them have (often not very obvious) lock-in barbs" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481144)) "once you're in AWS, they make using their managed things so tempting that convincing everyone else to not use them is an even bigger battle" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49301359)) "It is a little annoying being tied to AWS just for that, but very little of our traffic goes through them, so in practice it works." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47874923)) - Complex, opaque pricing (4 comments): "AWS having opaque billing and the ability to provide a huge amount of compute (even at high cost) at the click of a button" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48501122)) "pricing depends on so many factors like reserved/dedicated/spot/on-demand instances have all different prices" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48083939)) "Is true, probably, that AWS doesn’t know how much anyone’s use case will cost (even when it’s yet another version of something we’ve seen before)." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084997)) - No spending cap, easy overspending (2 comments): "There's infamously no way to set a max bill amount for an account in AWS, so it indeed has unlimited spending, but I'm okay with a couple hundred bucks a month." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47344430)) "I've only really used AWS at a startup, but this sounds kinda scary based on that experience just because it's so easy to configure services in AWS to cost you lots more." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927391)) - Overpriced compared to alternatives (3 comments): "how many millions / tens of millions / hundreds of millions are you imagining being spent on overpriced AWS services?" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086821)) "I haven't seen a single "cloud native" company yet that is not leaking hundreds of thousands of dollars per month to the US digital monopolists." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49935064)) "The big 3 are costing you as if it's still 2009, and they don't change this because people have an irrational attachment to overpaying." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46818099)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Google Cloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-cloud-platform.md): 161 recommend - [Microsoft Azure](https://hackerapproved.com/p/microsoft-azure.md): 153 recommend - [Scaleway](https://hackerapproved.com/p/scaleway.md): 70 recommend - [Oracle Cloud Free Tier](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oracle-cloud.md): 70 recommend - [OVHcloud](https://hackerapproved.com/p/ovhcloud.md): 16 recommend ## Where to get it - [Visit the official site](https://aws.amazon.com/) ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Amazon Web Services (AWS)", https://hackerapproved.com/p/amazon-web-services/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).