When The Cloud Bill Hits Different

You're just vibing, building your cool startup with minimal infrastructure, feeling like a tech genius... until that first cloud bill drops. That moment when you lift your sunglasses in disbelief at the $8,000 charge for what you thought was "free tier" AWS resources. Turns out those auto-scaling instances were scaling a bit too enthusiastically while you weren't looking. Nothing sobers up a founder faster than discovering your MongoDB instance has been running on the "we'll-take-your-entire-funding-round" pricing tier.