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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 th

by 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%.

by akerl_ 6y ago

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%.