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Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they revers

Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards. Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt.

harry8 5y ago
>DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt. Wuuuttt? Fraud is what.
- eric4smith 5y ago
  I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down. Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.
  - NullPrefix 5y ago
    Could it be a convenience charge?
    - 55555 5y ago
      Perhaps a billing fee?
  - stephenwilliams 5y ago
    Perhaps you have a snapshot? You should be able to look under your bill for a breakdown on what service the charge is for.
  - joncalhoun 5y ago
    I'd double check that you don't have multiple orgs. You used to share a cess to your account with people, then they made some org change a while back that essentially moved that shared access setup to an org and gave you a new personal account iirc. Easy to not realize you have both.
  - ihuman 5y ago
    The invoices on the billing page break down where the charges came from. If you download the pdf version, it has even more details.
  - harry8 5y ago
    You have in good faith attempted diligently to have a zero purchase. You cannot even find any purchases. In that case they have reached into your pocket and taken money without your consent. That is just a fact. By mistake? It's being short changed in a shop at the absolute best. This is not a mistake any company should be able to afford to make. Ever. Under any circumstances. If it really is "just an error" they need to making amends in a very public and obvious way that is clearly expensive to them to show good faith. But we don't get that. We have to fight from a position of being in the wrong when we have money taken from us by these fraudulent practices to overturn them. It is necessary to go HARD at the morality of "accidental theft" because it is so prevalent and because all these companies clearly don't consider it a detriment to their reputation. You've been diligent. When does it become their responsibility to not reach into your pocket when you clearly don't want that. Or anyone's pocket. I'd bet quite a sum that where there is one there is many.
    - MereInterest 5y ago
      This is where I'd say that every single paid service needs to have a way to contact a human being, and any cancellations expressed to that person by an authenticated user must be respected. If services are allowed to construct Gordian knots of byzantine interacting services, then there must be a way to cut through that mess.
pjanoman 5y ago
Honestly I get lost inside of AWS. Only recently was I able to figure out why I was getting charged $.82/month which, in the long run, is really nothing. But it's amazing how hard it was to figure out why I was getting charged for something that I originally thought was just going to be free.
- circularfoyers 5y ago
  What did it turn out to be that was charging that?
jrockway 5y ago
> DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Did you look at the PDF invoice in the Billing section? I have never seen an invoice where the line items didn't add up to the amount charged to my credit card. If there's just $2.40 on there with no explanation, I'd open a support ticket to complain. (While looking into this, I was surprised at how minimal DO invoices are, however. For GCP, I'm used to seeing on the order of a million line items per month. Seeing only 3 on my DO invoice was surprising, and could definitely lead to a case where something isn't accounted for correctly. But, I bet support will fix it up for you.)
willcipriano 5y ago
Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.
- saurik 5y ago
  I wonder if there is a human whose job is to final review suspensions and they just keep shaking their head at the measly pending $0.01 charge.
  - drewzero1 5y ago
    I keep a penny on my desk at work. Every time a coworker comes across somebody's account that is off by a penny, I offer it. They think I'm being funny, but the point I'm trying to make is that it wastes more than pennies worth of our time to spend it worrying about a few cents. I've seen people mail in checks worth less than the stamp it took to send them. It's a wild world out there.
    - mschuster91 5y ago
      The interesting thing is, accounts being off by a penny or two (excluding actions such as customers doing a mis-type in the bank transfer) can actually point to deeper issues such as improper rounding somewhere in the path.
      - drewzero1 5y ago
        Usually they wrote us a check for the wrong amount at some point and end up with a small balance remaining in their account. We don't want to just forgive and forget every time somebody owes us $0.16, but if it's been there months and it's going to take extra effort to get it from them, it's probably not worth it. We do try to determine where the discrepancy started and watch for indicators of a bigger issue.
      - devdas 5y ago
ladzoppelin 5y ago
Yeah but it shows they are reasonable and flexible if a customer makes a mistake. The reason Google Cloud is third, people remember how they were treated when they used Google for Work or whatever its called now. > But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". Is better then if they said: "We reminded you about the consequences of not deleting, we have done nothing wrong."
adamparsons 5y ago
> DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt. Oh I used to get this, for me it was snapshots of a VPS I destroyed. Completely my fault, but yeah it was annoying to figure out at the time. Probably worth checking you don't have any reserved IPs, disk backups or snapshots left over
batch12 5y ago
The billing statements I see in DO under Billing (sidebar) > Billing history seem pretty verbose to me. If it's not there I would recommend reaching out to their support.
bckr 5y ago
Ugh. I'm so glad my first owie was "only" $200. Hurt a lot at the time, though. I could still use that back...
xtracto 5y ago
I have a DO server thats been running for more rhan 5 years. It was the basic $5 bucks instance they offered at the time I felt a bit robbed a couple of days ago when I was spinning another instance and I saw that the newer $5 instance has more memory and more cpu power. I feel like they should have decreases the cost of the older less performant instance. I have been spoiled by my Internet provider who year after year they will automatically increase my speed as they made it cheaper, as I paid the same amount for the service.
- hobs 5y ago
  When they changed the pricing they emailed me and told me that I could effectively reprovision my machine to get the price difference, I think it was part of a rollout of some other infra as well.
pjc50 5y ago
I think I'm going to save this whole thread as "why zero friction micropayments are never going to happen".
Aeolun 5y ago
Isn’t DO some random saved image from years ago? I’m still paying them for a few of those I think.
xdennis 5y ago
I used the AWS free plan many many years ago as a student. I was so paranoid about losing money that I immediately shut what I was using down after I thought I didn't need it any more (even though leaving it on was part of the free plan). I turned off the instance, but I forgot the public IP. A month later I got charted a few pennies because an associated public IP is part of the free plan, but an un-associated one isn't. I didn't go bankrupt, but it proved to me how scummy AWS can be given that actually trying to use less is what got me charged.

harry8 5y ago

eric4smith 5y ago
I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down. Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.
- NullPrefix 5y ago
  Could it be a convenience charge?
  - 55555 5y ago
    Perhaps a billing fee?
- stephenwilliams 5y ago
  Perhaps you have a snapshot? You should be able to look under your bill for a breakdown on what service the charge is for.
- joncalhoun 5y ago
  I'd double check that you don't have multiple orgs. You used to share a cess to your account with people, then they made some org change a while back that essentially moved that shared access setup to an org and gave you a new personal account iirc. Easy to not realize you have both.
- ihuman 5y ago
  The invoices on the billing page break down where the charges came from. If you download the pdf version, it has even more details.
- harry8 5y ago
  You have in good faith attempted diligently to have a zero purchase. You cannot even find any purchases. In that case they have reached into your pocket and taken money without your consent. That is just a fact. By mistake? It's being short changed in a shop at the absolute best. This is not a mistake any company should be able to afford to make. Ever. Under any circumstances. If it really is "just an error" they need to making amends in a very public and obvious way that is clearly expensive to them to show good faith. But we don't get that. We have to fight from a position of being in the wrong when we have money taken from us by these fraudulent practices to overturn them. It is necessary to go HARD at the morality of "accidental theft" because it is so prevalent and because all these companies clearly don't consider it a detriment to their reputation. You've been diligent. When does it become their responsibility to not reach into your pocket when you clearly don't want that. Or anyone's pocket. I'd bet quite a sum that where there is one there is many.
  - MereInterest 5y ago
    This is where I'd say that every single paid service needs to have a way to contact a human being, and any cancellations expressed to that person by an authenticated user must be respected. If services are allowed to construct Gordian knots of byzantine interacting services, then there must be a way to cut through that mess.

pjanoman 5y ago

Honestly I get lost inside of AWS. Only recently was I able to figure out why I was getting charged $.82/month which, in the long run, is really nothing. But it's amazing how hard it was to figure out why I was getting charged for something that I originally thought was just going to be free.

circularfoyers 5y ago
What did it turn out to be that was charging that?

jrockway 5y ago

> DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Did you look at the PDF invoice in the Billing section? I have never seen an invoice where the line items didn't add up to the amount charged to my credit card. If there's just $2.40 on there with no explanation, I'd open a support ticket to complain. (While looking into this, I was surprised at how minimal DO invoices are, however. For GCP, I'm used to seeing on the order of a million line items per month. Seeing only 3 on my DO invoice was surprising, and could definitely lead to a case where something isn't accounted for correctly. But, I bet support will fix it up for you.)

willcipriano 5y ago

Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.

saurik 5y ago
I wonder if there is a human whose job is to final review suspensions and they just keep shaking their head at the measly pending $0.01 charge.
- drewzero1 5y ago
  I keep a penny on my desk at work. Every time a coworker comes across somebody's account that is off by a penny, I offer it. They think I'm being funny, but the point I'm trying to make is that it wastes more than pennies worth of our time to spend it worrying about a few cents. I've seen people mail in checks worth less than the stamp it took to send them. It's a wild world out there.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    The interesting thing is, accounts being off by a penny or two (excluding actions such as customers doing a mis-type in the bank transfer) can actually point to deeper issues such as improper rounding somewhere in the path.
    - drewzero1 5y ago
      Usually they wrote us a check for the wrong amount at some point and end up with a small balance remaining in their account. We don't want to just forgive and forget every time somebody owes us $0.16, but if it's been there months and it's going to take extra effort to get it from them, it's probably not worth it. We do try to determine where the discrepancy started and watch for indicators of a bigger issue.
    - devdas 5y ago

ladzoppelin 5y ago

Yeah but it shows they are reasonable and flexible if a customer makes a mistake. The reason Google Cloud is third, people remember how they were treated when they used Google for Work or whatever its called now. > But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time". Is better then if they said: "We reminded you about the consequences of not deleting, we have done nothing wrong."

adamparsons 5y ago

> DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt. Oh I used to get this, for me it was snapshots of a VPS I destroyed. Completely my fault, but yeah it was annoying to figure out at the time. Probably worth checking you don't have any reserved IPs, disk backups or snapshots left over

batch12 5y ago

The billing statements I see in DO under Billing (sidebar) > Billing history seem pretty verbose to me. If it's not there I would recommend reaching out to their support.

bckr 5y ago

Ugh. I'm so glad my first owie was "only" $200. Hurt a lot at the time, though. I could still use that back...

xtracto 5y ago

I have a DO server thats been running for more rhan 5 years. It was the basic $5 bucks instance they offered at the time I felt a bit robbed a couple of days ago when I was spinning another instance and I saw that the newer $5 instance has more memory and more cpu power. I feel like they should have decreases the cost of the older less performant instance. I have been spoiled by my Internet provider who year after year they will automatically increase my speed as they made it cheaper, as I paid the same amount for the service.

hobs 5y ago
When they changed the pricing they emailed me and told me that I could effectively reprovision my machine to get the price difference, I think it was part of a rollout of some other infra as well.

pjc50 5y ago

I think I'm going to save this whole thread as "why zero friction micropayments are never going to happen".

Aeolun 5y ago

Isn’t DO some random saved image from years ago? I’m still paying them for a few of those I think.

xdennis 5y ago

I used the AWS free plan many many years ago as a student. I was so paranoid about losing money that I immediately shut what I was using down after I thought I didn't need it any more (even though leaving it on was part of the free plan). I turned off the instance, but I forgot the public IP. A month later I got charted a few pennies because an associated public IP is part of the free plan, but an un-associated one isn't. I didn't go bankrupt, but it proved to me how scummy AWS can be given that actually trying to use less is what got me charged.