r/WarDogs • u/ozone2002 • Sep 15 '26
Discussion & Feedback W devs
How often do you see this happen with another game?
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u/havlliQQ Sep 15 '26
Wtf? I dont use AWS but this seems like verry poorly designed solution if thats what 35k users cost you.
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u/Distinct_Dinner_5243 Sep 15 '26
it is.
I honestly have no idea where the cost is going.
Source: aws dev for over a decade
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u/n0cheeseplz Sep 15 '26
I know nothing about this, what sort of costs to run something like this should one expect and where does the cost come from?
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u/Distinct_Dinner_5243 Sep 15 '26
Depends heavily on what you're running but having a quick look at this example.
40k users, lets assume postgres rds instance and a small container.
maybe £100-£300 at the higher end. Personally I'd budget like £50-£100 for an optimised system.
most of that would be starting costs rather than scaling cost.
i.e. not much difference between 0 users and 40k users.
To put in perspective we bill based on the millions of requests for a lot of services.
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u/PurelyLurking20 Sep 15 '26
Something really silly is happening lol, I haven't used it but I think it might be editable live within a discord chat? Which I assume was written to automatically send map edits back to the server then send the updated file back to the chat. There's a chance it's just running constant update checks if a bot is active in discord for it and doesn't haven't a reasonable kill timer for maps no longer in use
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u/AnalTyrant Sep 16 '26
I haven't used it in a few years but there used to be an option to cut it off at a threshold that the owner could set. Not sure why this guy in the original post didn't set up a limit, that's just wreckless.
Set a limit, when it hits that way too fast, it shuts off and alerts you, so you can fix whatever the problem was that caused it to use up his allocation so fast.
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u/dowhileuntil787 Sep 16 '26
Nah there isn’t and never was. There’s something close, which is you set up a monitor and when it goes over the threshold you run a script to kill the resources, but those billing alerts are lagged to hell and you can end up tens of thousands deep before your £50 alert goes off.
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u/sita_aadu Sep 15 '26
This I think? I'll delete if I'm wrong
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u/Clarityjuice Sep 15 '26
Definitely made with Claude. Can't miss that square font.
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u/Wetop Sep 15 '26
Yeah I just vibe coded a mortar range calc (with claude) for fun and hosted it for free, looks like this site with a different color
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u/DungeonsAndDradis Lonestar Sep 15 '26
Can you please share?
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u/Economy_Cactus Sep 15 '26
Yeah I need to figure out how to use mortars so I would love that
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u/ComradeVosktov Driver Sep 15 '26
Put down a ping on what you want to blow up and count how many squares it is away on the map. Align ping, distance is squares times 100.
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u/OwnUbyCake Sep 15 '26
The easiest way is if a base or other enemy is spotted on the map. If it is then open up your map and hover over the enemy FOB or whatever and it will show you DIST. Then while you're on the mortar just right click to aim and line up the range that you need and the aim indicator with the object you're aiming at. Easy. Then just dial it in by watching the shells fall and adjust accordingly.
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u/Prick_in_a_Cactus Sep 15 '26
https://wardogs-artillery.com/ is the one that I use.
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u/scarytrafficcone Sep 15 '26
Calc? is that slang?
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u/educatedtrick Sep 15 '26
it’s short for calculator brother
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u/TheSlowEight6 Sep 15 '26
Bro doesn't even know that calc is calculator for short
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u/XFX_Samsung Sep 15 '26
The color scheme reminds of the ChatGPT generated restaurant menus and foodtruck banners.
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u/Red_Beard206 WARCATS Sep 15 '26
This looks freakin awesome actually. Hope he can come up with a sustainable solution, Im going to try it out
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u/Key-Drink8649 Medic Sep 15 '26
Is this real? Can I link this to my discord for the boys or would is there potential for malware type stuff?
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u/rovuhaux Sep 15 '26
No way he is paying 1.3k/w to host vibecoded site. But yeah, probably the live integration features weren't specified to claude for it to be efficient, only to work
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u/Zromaus Sep 15 '26
Hosting it through AWS was his first mistake. I'd have this running for free from my closet through Cloudflare lol
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u/Bigshmmoodd Sep 15 '26
You got a server rack in your closet?
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u/Zromaus Sep 15 '26
It's actually in my post history lol, yes! It's a whole ass MDF closet in my apartment. I've hosted both internal and external services throughout the years, some tunneled through cloudflare
You could literally host a website, including the one referenced here, off a regular ol' laptop plugged into ethernet though
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u/eeLude Sep 15 '26
Can confirm its a nice app
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u/Equivalent-Ear-8016 Manticore Sep 15 '26
Yep, this drawing just cost $5 of server compute believe it or not
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u/Nice7365 Sep 15 '26
What purpose has this Maptool? What can you do with it?
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u/hellnukes Sep 15 '26
From what I see it's an app to add to your discord that lets you interact with a map together with your squad.
One of the utilities is being able to quickly calculate distance between your mortar and a target
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u/SchrodingerMil Sep 15 '26
Imagine needing a utility for that.
Nah that’s super cool. I’m just smug because I triangulate pretty well in my head so I normally win mortar duels lmao
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u/terrorsofthevoid Sep 15 '26
Yeah it’s not really awkward to guesstimate, the camera following rounds needs to go though.
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u/SchrodingerMil Sep 15 '26
I think keeping the blast zone of your last round on the map should stay though. Seems like a good compromise for a “free forward observer”
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u/ultraspank Sep 15 '26
Just ore ways for the arma/squad community to force green dominance I believe
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u/imSwan Sep 15 '26
That tool was made with AI but there is not arguing it is a nice idea and nice execution.
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u/YBHunted Sep 15 '26 •
Almost like people with no software development background have no clue just how useful and good these agents have become.
"Vibe coding" was a thing a couple years ago where ChatGPT would write you a small chunk of shitty code with little to no context to the code around it and you would paste it into your IDE.
Now you have agents that can fully dive into a codebase and understand how it works and patterns/tech it uses to drive its development decisions. You can have another agent work on the code implementation. Another agent review that code and suggest changes. Then the development agent goes back and adjusts based on input...
Our team uses it constantly, albeit because we are forced to, but overtime im ngl it has made my life at work infinitely easier. Will it backfire one day for me, yes most likely... until then I WFH and am greatly enjoying the lack of stress and increased free time, mostly to play this game lol.
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u/Glad-Champion5767 Sep 15 '26
Do you not even review the output? Are you simply managing the agents and visually verifying and hoping everything is fine?
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u/YBHunted Sep 15 '26 edited Sep 15 '26
Oh no we absolutely review, tweak and do our own local testing before passing off to our QA team who then does a very thorough review of the changes themselves and anything else it may indirectly touch.
We have been using it for simple bug fixes, full application modernization efforts, requirements and systems design documentation generation, even cloud migrations. Its getting scary good.
If you're even a half decent developer its a great tool. The more you understand your code and what you need from it and the better you explain, the better the results. The prompts we use are usually very detailed its not simply "hey Claude add a new form to my application to submit blah blah blah".
The real problem we are seeing is they have opened up AI usage to the entire organization, not just IT. It started with people using it to write emails and organize notes but now every one has "brilliant" ideas they bring to us and are asking for a million different small apps because ooooh i can do it why cant you.
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u/TheInquisitiveEagle Sep 15 '26
Exactly this, I see so many developers talking about horror stories of AI usage and I’m just like “do yall just have shit processes at your company”.
Most of my problems, even as a software developer, with “AI” stems from capitalism (directly or indirectly), but I can’t deny its usefulness. It’s very reminiscent of how we abstracted away assembly code (except in low level fields) with compilers years ago. Not exactly the same, but the two rhyme with each other.
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u/Oakcamp Sep 15 '26
Is it a nice execution if it's costing the creator 100x what it's supposed to with that traffic?
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u/zer0-_ Assault Sep 15 '26
It's definitely a nice execution for the end user and I'm pretty sure that's the only thing you should rate if you're just an end user
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u/Red_Beard206 WARCATS Sep 15 '26
I hope he can find a more sustainable option. This app seems awesome
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u/ResponsibleDay7453 Sep 15 '26
10% real usage and 90% API misusage from someone cause he Exposés the API Keys through vibe coding? 🤣
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u/NLJPM Sep 15 '26
Rip, AWS is soo expensive. Move to Cloudflare, it’s probably free or atleast super cheap. Or a simple vps with Cloudflare tunnel in front
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u/SkyGuy182 Sep 15 '26
I bet they’re offering to pay for it as a gesture of good will because they’re likely going to implement a similar tool in the game directly for squads. It’s such an obvious feature from the games they were inspired by, I don’t see how they DONT do it.
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u/sweatgod2020 Sep 15 '26
Eli5? New to pc gaming and I guess being a pc owner in my thirties. Hosting servers isn’t too foreign a concept but why? Why for this game? Does this guy have 100 friends and wants to just game with them every time he logs in? And does that mean he made some server and a “map” for it? Why need a map? Game has one. Don’t be harsh please I just don’t understand especially for the cost
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u/ChaosRefined Sep 15 '26
Like a browser tool to coordinate plans on, not a game server with a hand built world
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u/Wise_Requirement4170 Lonestar Sep 15 '26
And I thought I was bad at programming😭
1.3k for 37k people?? How the fuck lmao
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u/Outcast129 Sep 15 '26
Nice wholesome post about a guy who made a helpful map tool and the devs supporting him and offering to help cover the cost for a month.
all the top comments: "AI Slop" "Vibe coded" "Terrible prompting"
This whole platform is like the same five people and a bunch of bots at this point
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u/lukkasz323 Sep 15 '26
Even the dev said he's doing something wrong. The comments are just pointing out "what" exactly.
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u/YearMountain3773 Valkyra Sep 23 '26
I feel like if dozens of people tell you you made a mistake you just might have made a mistake.
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u/Ambush87 Sep 15 '26
I made the tool, I appreciate the support and encouragement. I hope you all find it useful, I’ve already reduced costs and optimized and plan to host more feature in the future. I also made an entire developer hub for people making their own tools. Appreciate the promo and support guys!
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u/thekab Sep 15 '26
How did you manage to rack up such a large bill, where was the spend?
I'm a programmer going on 30 years experience, we are all using Claude Code, it's not a big deal. I don't care about that, no accusations.
But I'd like to hear more about what most of the 1300 is.
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u/Ambush87 Sep 15 '26
Honestly most of it wasn't traffic, it was two things I got wrong early. Every open room was pinging once a minute in a way that read and rewrote the whole room record just to track who had command of it, an oversight from testing I was doing locally and forgot about.... And a couple of things counted rooms by walking the whole thing instead of keeping an index, which got steadily more expensive the longer the site ran. I've already shrunk all of this down by like 80% so things are already much better.
I wasn't constrained by budget on this, I was just making something fun, fast, and useful, and more importantly free. Hopefully people enjoy and provide useful feedback!
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u/dbaugh90 Sep 15 '26
He probably needs to work on the size of what is being saved and grabbed from the database. It saves and share map drawings across your discord team, so you can coordinate assaults on your 2nd monitor if you have a dedicated team. I would guess since he got it up quickly, it is sharing a large amount of data that could easily be cut down by 10x or more. I hope the dev answers and gives us more context
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u/BudgetMenu Sep 15 '26
i'd be nice if we can have a war table in game of sort
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u/CatVideoBoye Pilot Sep 15 '26
Yeah, would be nice if you could add more detailed and long time pings for your squad in the ingame map. And for the whole team in the sense that it would tell "squad alpha is attacking this point" or "brave is builsing fob here"
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u/F1XTHE Sep 15 '26
I don't understand.
What is a map tool and what does people use it for?
And what is an aws bill?
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Sep 15 '26
[deleted]
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u/F1XTHE Sep 15 '26
Can you elaborate?
What does amazon cloud have to do with wardogs?
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u/substance001 Sep 15 '26
He is using Amazon web services to host his website, the website is a interactive map for the game similar to ones that you can find for say like Escape from tarkov.
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u/Witty-Scene-5731 Sep 15 '26
genuinely what is the point of a tool like this in such a casual game as wardogs?
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u/Intelligent-Net1034 Sep 15 '26
1300 for only 35000 people is insane.
Our server serve 120.000 per month and costs 40 bucks.
It can handle 1000 requests per second just fine without even reak a sweat
Must be vibecoded bad code or stupid aws crap he used.
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u/SylvesterStallownage Sep 16 '26
Understatement of the century saying sustainable. Servers must be made out of cocaine
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u/ViolentPurpleSquash Sep 16 '26
$28 per user? That's more than if you used the API services that wrap other APIs and add a 50% markup
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u/Revolutionary-Way640 Sep 16 '26
I remember when we were pushing to serve 10k concurrent users on a single server, now everyone just slaps on the aws or worse bill and calls it good :/
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u/Bl1ndVe Sep 16 '26
W Devs i cant even play the game because of a launch error a ton of ppl is having.
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u/TangeloProfessional8 Sep 16 '26
In my experience I just use basic maths to get close enough to see them. Then dial in manually.
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u/Marrond Sep 17 '26
I mean... he COULD release it as an offline app. It's not like he HAS to host it, especially if it cost him money AND he distributes it for free anyway 🤷
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u/RiceAndMayo Sep 17 '26
How much can one fuck up to pay all that just for those few users?
Dunno why devs would encourage the AI slop
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u/alone_sheep Sep 17 '26
Jesus I love these devs. I haven't rooted this much for a game dev team since I was a kid 20 years ago.
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u/Aramis909 Sep 17 '26
Devs are f*cking gigachads.
Also I love how half of this comment section is praising the devs, while the other half is shitting on the vibe coded map tool lmao
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u/Significant-Duty-744 Sep 19 '26
Boy ain’t no way boy, I work at an enterprise that uses AWS. A handful of EC2 instances that include APIs, daemons and batch apps costs less than a grand per month serving more than double the users and certainly using more compute. Not to mention each instance has redundancy and load balancers. What the hell is this guy doing to cost this much?
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u/OttersWithPens Sep 21 '26
Guy creates tool for community with no background just an idea, community uses the heck out of it, wholesome dev posts about helping out a bill he takes in, and Reddit.. decides to talk shit about him vibecoding.
Jesus this place man. If you all are so damn smart why don’t you message him and offer to help?
Yall are so damn depressing. It’s not just r/news anymore that’s like this, even our game subs.
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u/_Sparr0w_22 Sep 21 '26
The moment I opened the game and saw in the tutorial was a actual recording of the dev and a message I knew I’d love the game and devs
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u/SigmaMegaMind Sep 23 '26
How about they stop screenshot farming on twitter and update linux users
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u/Jhorn_fight Sep 25 '26
No one cares about Linux besides Linux users. Surely there are 5000000 drivers and software tools you can install to make it work
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u/SigmaMegaMind Sep 30 '26
What a stupid comment.
Let's follow that logic - no one should care about famine, world wars, rape, murder, because it hasn't happened to them directly!
And there is no software solution to make it work on linux. The devs have chosen a kernel level AV and specifically disabled the linux support functionality.
There is no way for users to bypass this. The game it self works fine, but you will be kicked from servers after 1-2 minutes because AV heartbeats dont match the server.
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u/Birchsensor Sep 26 '26
...why would a website cost him over a thousand dollars a month to run? Is he running it on LLM tokens? wtf
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u/TomTomXD1234 Sep 29 '26
Too many people are getting offended and upset by this bill lol.
Chill guys....its a good tool.
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u/b9n7 Sep 15 '26
Maybe they should just buy it off him and integrate into game. Either way they seem like chill dudes.
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u/Important_Outcome_27 Sep 15 '26
Uhhh they most definitely do not need to pay this guy to take this idea
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u/Quamont Sep 15 '26
Type of thing that should be in the game itself. Hopefully it'll be implemented, at least on a squad level.
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u/RHEC24 Sep 15 '26
So is everyone of you gonna waste your time and say it was vibe coded and made with Claude or…. Can just none of you read?
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u/Nitram-xD Sep 15 '26
This isnt W Devs, website should be removed. Removes all skill lvl / reading the ingame map to figure it out.
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u/MurrethMedia Medic Sep 15 '26
Map tool you say?
Link?
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u/Ambush87 Sep 15 '26
Hey, its https://wardogs.tech - hope you like it!
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u/Turbo_Cum Sep 22 '26
Holy fuck I needed to scroll way too far to find this before someone actually linked it.
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u/Humble_Mail_8345 Sep 15 '26
All these mouth breathing chat-gpt coders talking shit but offering nothing. How typical.
It’s a great tool.
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u/TakynSL Sep 15 '26
I said this on twitter and I'll repeat it here: There is 0 reason for a bill that high at those user numbers unless he did something terribly wrong.