OP here. Some updates and clarifications are in order! First of all, I just woke up (it’s morning here in Helsinki) and found a nice email from Amazon letting

OP here. Some updates and clarifications are in order! First of all, I just woke up (it’s morning here in Helsinki) and found a nice email from Amazon letting me know that they had refunded the retrieval cost to my account. They also acknowledged the need to clarify the charges on their product pages. This obviously makes me happy, but I would caution against taking this as a signal that Amazon will bail you out in case you mess up like I did. It continues to be up to us to fully understand the products and associated liabilities we sign up for. I didn't request a refund because I frankly didn't think I had a case. The only angle I considered pursuing was the boto bug. Even though it didn't increase my bill, it stopped me from getting my files quickly. And getting them quickly was what I was paying the huge premium for. That said, here are some comments on specific issues raised in this thread: - Using Arq or S3's lifecycle policies would have made a huge difference in my retrieval experience. Unfortunately for me, those options didn't exist when I first uploaded the archives, and switching to them would have involved the same sort of retrieval process I described in the post. - During my investigation and even my visits to the AWS console, I saw plenty of tools and options for limiting retrieval rates and costs. The problem was that since my mental model had the maximum cost at less than a dollar, I didn't pay attention. I imagined that the tools were there for people with terabytes or petabytes of archives, not for me with just 60GB. - I continue to believe that “starting at $0.011 per gigabyte” is not a honest way of describing the data retrieval costs of Glacier, especially when the actual cost is detailed, of all things, as an answer to a FAQ question. I hammer on this point because I don't think other AWS products have this problem. - I obviously don't think it's against the law here in Finland to migrate content off your legally bought CDs and then throw the CDs out. Selling the originals, or even giving them away to friend, might have been a different story. But as pointed out in the thread, your mileage will vary. - I am a very happy AWS customer, and my business will continue to spend tens of thousands a year on AWS services. That goes to something boulos said in the thread: "I think the reality is that most cloud customers are approximately consumers". You'd hope my due diligence is better on the business side of things, as a 185X mistake there would easily bankrupt the whole company. But the consumer me and the business owner me are, at the end, the same person.