> their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. (...) Yes, I have to pay for that support. My ex

> their tech support team. It is by far one of, if not the best, technical support teams I've ever dealt with. (...) Yes, I have to pay for that support. My experience is very much the opposite of what you wrote, both with free support and paid Amazon Managed Services. Their support can often be as helpful and truthful as their piece of crap parody of a services health dashboard[1]. > I also pay for tech support for other things: my automobile When your vehicle is under warranty, you've already paid for checks and repairs upfront. Just like you pay for amzn's services. You can buy additional support for your car and cloud stuff, and better private healthcare, but you don't _have_to_ if you've paid for warranty or insurance. Depends of course on use case and what you need: help building stuff or help figuring out why isn't stuff working as you'd like it to. When you want Amazon to simply fix their shit, paying for support smells like an extortion and pushing you to forums will give them more time to not provide fixes. Therefore I think that the commenter you are responding to is right: Amazon seems to be attempting to acquire free workforce and pushing their customers to "community support" or whatever shitty phrasing they'll use to set up a barrier between a customer and their actual employees. And they do have a long history of exploiting and even destroying their customers (diapers dot com etc). I believe that the problem Amazon has right now is that they created certification-based business model which was one of factors raising salaries in the sector but they would still like to pay shit and overwork their staff paid in peanuts. And while I know what salaries can an engineer expect for working for AWS in the US, I don't remember when was the last time I dealt with non-Indian reps. [1] status.aws.amazon.com