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Oh come on. We all know that the 'accidental revenue' from the way Free Tier is set up probably makes up a cool 2 million or more annually. Plenty to justify it

Oh come on. We all know that the 'accidental revenue' from the way Free Tier is set up probably makes up a cool 2 million or more annually. Plenty to justify its continued abuse of naive students. Why would they walk away from that cash? The only people they're pissing off is people who aren't using AWS anyway.

akerl_ 6y ago
I’ve heard of plenty of people accidentally blasting past the free tier, or past dev credits, or other ways where they got burned by a surprise bill. 100% of those people have gotten a refund from AWS support by filing a ticket. AWS pretty clearly isn’t raking in money on this. Even at your imaginary 2 million a year, that’s a drop in the bucket for AWS, let alone Amazon.
- userbinator 6y ago
  AWS bets on everyone who doesn't notice small recurring charges, not those who blow up their budget past the point of sanity.
  - akerl_ 6y ago
    That seems even more implausible. Do charges small enough to not be noticed stand a chance of being noteworthy for AWS?
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  It's got to be Hanlon's Razor here, I doubt AWS is twirling their mustache and cackling maniacally. It's probably a difficult problem to solve and not easily attachable to a profit center or something, so nobody feels empowered to actually fix it. I'm sure some crusader within AWS could get it done if they tried hard enough and collected the data to show the negative side effects and how they effect AWS. An article like this one is hopefully going to get someone within AWS to do just that.
  - akerl_ 6y ago
    I think this is actually the failure mode for companies like AWS: they may earnestly be so large/complex that no well-intentioned crusader can push through an improvement like this. My gut is that this is actually the cause of most of the “evil” things that “large” companies do, where eventually they get so big and/or complicated that organizing an organic positive change isn’t plausible.
  - beoberha 6y ago
    One person isn’t going to come remotely close to fixing this. I work for AWS/Azure/GCP and can tell you first hand that billing is an insanely hard problem to solve. It’s all done in batch by the service itself and pushed to a centralized service once all the hard work has been done. Each service has a small, underfunded team that handles billing and their last thought is some random guy spending a few grand on his personal account. Every ounce of their energy is going to reducing their own COGs and reacting to the asks of the biggest customers.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  I did that, I didn't get a refund. Lost about $180. I have a friend who I know didnt get a refund. There is someone elsewhere in this post who didnt get a refund. I don't know what the refund rate is, but it isn't 100%.
gibba999 6y ago
This ain't it. Obfuscated billing helps Amazon with $350/hour engineers, where an engineer figuring out where $10k is going each year isn't a top priority. Been there, done that. Obfuscated billing is definitely not there to hit free tier or poor folks. AWS has an awesome reputation for just about everything, and it isn't worth the reputation hit. Free tier is there so that: * the student in college will pick AWS in their first job * the random engineer will prototype something on the weekend, and Amazon gets millions of business * the random pre-funding startup starts building on AWS, and if it goes big, so does the account And it works. Amazon has made millions based on things I've built on free tier. AWS' problem is that my ONE YEAR free tier ran out probably around a decade ago, and I've long since moved on from what I was doing then. If AWS were to continue to provide me a free tier, the same thing would have happened a few times since.
PeterisP 6y ago
AWS annual revenue is $50+ billion. (https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-run-rate-hits-54-billion-annual-run-rate/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-run-rate-hits-54-billion-a...) Anything that they can get from "naive students" and developers who don't notice small recurring charges is so utterly insignificant that it can't justify any decision whatsoever. If the public relations aspects of it cause even a 0.01% change in AWS growth, that's already $5 million of lost revenue; if you can assure developers worldwide that it's not so risky to try and adopt AWS a bit more and get a 1% extra growth, that would be worth $500 million and justify walking away from all kinds of irrelevantly small cash flows.
- throwawaaarrgh 6y ago
  If bad PR affected their business, they might have something to consider. But this will never affect their growth. They're not going to lose a single solitary sale that isn't already accounted for by their standard profit model. The only bad PR that would affect their business is if their actual reputation as a service provider were tarnished. Charging people money for a service they used does not tarnish AWS's reputation. It's their whole business model. When you stay in a hotel room longer than you're supposed to and they charge you for another half day, or you eat food from the mini fridge, or buy a pay-per-view movie, etc, you could claim ignorance, and create stories about how terrible it is that people get charged for these things unknowingly. But Holiday Inn's bookings are still not going to take a noticeable hit. Moreover, they don't even need to offer a Free Tier to get people to use AWS. They're AWS. They're the gold standard. It's like saying IBM would need a Free Tier (back when IBM wasn't trash). It wasn't a question of whether you should use IBM, it was whether you could afford it.

akerl_ 6y ago

I’ve heard of plenty of people accidentally blasting past the free tier, or past dev credits, or other ways where they got burned by a surprise bill. 100% of those people have gotten a refund from AWS support by filing a ticket. AWS pretty clearly isn’t raking in money on this. Even at your imaginary 2 million a year, that’s a drop in the bucket for AWS, let alone Amazon.

userbinator 6y ago
AWS bets on everyone who doesn't notice small recurring charges, not those who blow up their budget past the point of sanity.
- akerl_ 6y ago
  That seems even more implausible. Do charges small enough to not be noticed stand a chance of being noteworthy for AWS?
TameAntelope 6y ago
It's got to be Hanlon's Razor here, I doubt AWS is twirling their mustache and cackling maniacally. It's probably a difficult problem to solve and not easily attachable to a profit center or something, so nobody feels empowered to actually fix it. I'm sure some crusader within AWS could get it done if they tried hard enough and collected the data to show the negative side effects and how they effect AWS. An article like this one is hopefully going to get someone within AWS to do just that.
- akerl_ 6y ago
  I think this is actually the failure mode for companies like AWS: they may earnestly be so large/complex that no well-intentioned crusader can push through an improvement like this. My gut is that this is actually the cause of most of the “evil” things that “large” companies do, where eventually they get so big and/or complicated that organizing an organic positive change isn’t plausible.
- beoberha 6y ago
  One person isn’t going to come remotely close to fixing this. I work for AWS/Azure/GCP and can tell you first hand that billing is an insanely hard problem to solve. It’s all done in batch by the service itself and pushed to a centralized service once all the hard work has been done. Each service has a small, underfunded team that handles billing and their last thought is some random guy spending a few grand on his personal account. Every ounce of their energy is going to reducing their own COGs and reacting to the asks of the biggest customers.
CJefferson 6y ago
I did that, I didn't get a refund. Lost about $180. I have a friend who I know didnt get a refund. There is someone elsewhere in this post who didnt get a refund. I don't know what the refund rate is, but it isn't 100%.

gibba999 6y ago

This ain't it. Obfuscated billing helps Amazon with $350/hour engineers, where an engineer figuring out where $10k is going each year isn't a top priority. Been there, done that. Obfuscated billing is definitely not there to hit free tier or poor folks. AWS has an awesome reputation for just about everything, and it isn't worth the reputation hit. Free tier is there so that: * the student in college will pick AWS in their first job * the random engineer will prototype something on the weekend, and Amazon gets millions of business * the random pre-funding startup starts building on AWS, and if it goes big, so does the account And it works. Amazon has made millions based on things I've built on free tier. AWS' problem is that my ONE YEAR free tier ran out probably around a decade ago, and I've long since moved on from what I was doing then. If AWS were to continue to provide me a free tier, the same thing would have happened a few times since.

PeterisP 6y ago

AWS annual revenue is $50+ billion. (https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-run-rate-hits-54-billion-annual-run-rate/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-run-rate-hits-54-billion-a...) Anything that they can get from "naive students" and developers who don't notice small recurring charges is so utterly insignificant that it can't justify any decision whatsoever. If the public relations aspects of it cause even a 0.01% change in AWS growth, that's already $5 million of lost revenue; if you can assure developers worldwide that it's not so risky to try and adopt AWS a bit more and get a 1% extra growth, that would be worth $500 million and justify walking away from all kinds of irrelevantly small cash flows.

throwawaaarrgh 6y ago
If bad PR affected their business, they might have something to consider. But this will never affect their growth. They're not going to lose a single solitary sale that isn't already accounted for by their standard profit model. The only bad PR that would affect their business is if their actual reputation as a service provider were tarnished. Charging people money for a service they used does not tarnish AWS's reputation. It's their whole business model. When you stay in a hotel room longer than you're supposed to and they charge you for another half day, or you eat food from the mini fridge, or buy a pay-per-view movie, etc, you could claim ignorance, and create stories about how terrible it is that people get charged for these things unknowingly. But Holiday Inn's bookings are still not going to take a noticeable hit. Moreover, they don't even need to offer a Free Tier to get people to use AWS. They're AWS. They're the gold standard. It's like saying IBM would need a Free Tier (back when IBM wasn't trash). It wasn't a question of whether you should use IBM, it was whether you could afford it.