I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this. As others in the thread have mentioned, the core problem of tracking your AWS costs and where they're coming from is still a very hard problem for most organizations. Especially startups.
I'm a co-founder of https://www.vantage.sh/ which helps organizations track their AWS costs and we'll look at incorporating Advance Pay balances into the platform.
>I'm surprised it took this long for AWS to launch something as basic as this.
I'm not surprised. I'm convinced AWS has strategically focused on making costs difficult to keep on top of so you just pick a service, assume it's magically cost optimized for you and use it even though that's not reality.
Side note, I love the Vantage EC2 instance comparison chart, I've used it a few times recently and it made my life so much easier. Thank you and your team(s) for providing this freely and publicly:
https://instances.vantage.sh/
I'm a co-founder of https://www.vantage.sh/ which helps organizations track their AWS costs and we'll look at incorporating Advance Pay balances into the platform.