My roots, ironically, are in the Cloud!

Or, how a $0.005-an-hour AWS pricing rule made me nostalgic

They say your roots stay with you no matter how far you travel. Turns out that’s true even in a career.

A large part of my professional life was spent knee-deep in EC2, VPCs, S3, RDS, Load Balancers, Elastic IPs, and the rest of the AWS alphabet soup. Long before AI agents became the flavour of the month, I was losing sleep over servers, IP addresses, and the eternal mystery of why the AWS bill was suddenly higher than last month. 😄

Recently, something dragged me right back to those days – an old AWS pricing model with a philosophy so ridiculous that I ended up coining a name for it.

Pay As You Don’t Go.

Yes, you read that right. Not “pay as you go.” The opposite. Stay with me.

Here’s the whole thing in two lines:

Use it → don’t pay.
Don’t use it → pay.

Go on, admit it. You’re a little surprised. Is there actually a payment mechanism that punishes you for not using something? Which AWS service pulls this off? And more importantly – why did nobody tell you?

Well, technically, there was. And my old friend from the AWS days – the Elastic IP (EIP) – sat right at the centre of it. Before February 2024, AWS ran an interesting model for EIPs. Allocate one and attach it to a running EC2 instance, and it was free. Allocate one and just let it sit there, unattached and unused, and AWS charged you for the privilege of hoarding it.

Use it, don’t pay. Don’t use it, pay. Hence – “Pay As You Don’t Go.” (Yes, I coined it. I will be mentioning this again.)

AWS eventually retired the model. From February 1, 2024, every public IPv4 address started costing $0.005 an hour, whether it was doing any work or not. So technically, “Pay As You Don’t Go” is now history. A museum piece. But I still love the phrase, because – did I mention – I coined it.

Which brings up the obvious question: why on earth would AWS design a pricing rule like this in the first place? Was this just a clever way to squeeze a few more cents out of customers? Not really. There was an actual, sensible reason behind it, and it comes down to one fact:

IPv4 addresses are scarce. Very scarce. There’s only a finite number of them, and we’ve been burning through that pool for decades. Every new server, device, and service that came online chipped away a little more at what was left. That created a real problem for AWS. Customers could allocate an Elastic IP, hang on to it “just in case”, and then quietly forget it existed. Meanwhile, that address was occupying a parking spot somebody else genuinely needed.

And AWS, had no interest in running the world’s most expensive parking lot for addresses nobody was using. 😄So instead of writing a strongly worded policy that said “please stop hoarding IPv4 addresses”, AWS did something far more effective. It said: “Sure, keep it if you want. It’ll just cost you.” A gentle nudge disguised as a billing line. Pretty clever, if you ask me.

Here’s my confession: I have, at various points, paid AWS for things I wasn’t using. And I’d bet good money I’m not the only one. That’s the thing about the Cloud – creating something is dangerously easy. A few clicks and you’ve spun up a server, a database, an Elastic IP. Forgetting about it is even easier. And then, one day, the bill shows up.

“Wait… what is this?”

You start digging – EC2, EBS, snapshots, NAT Gateways, Elastic IPs – until you finally track down that thing you spun up six months ago and completely forgot existed. The Cloud doesn’t judge. The Cloud just bills.

And honestly, that’s what I liked about “Pay As You Don’t Go” once I stopped to think about it. It wasn’t just a pricing quirk. It was a nudge to ask a genuinely useful question: do I actually need this? Maybe that’s worth asking outside of AWS too. Because more often than not, the real cost isn’t in creating something.

It’s in forgetting to let it go.