38 ms·

Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith act

Have you contacted Azure? On one hand you owe the money “fair and square”, but on the other if I were them I’d waive an unexpected $10k bill to a good faith actor that was incurred without any proactive notification by Azure.

jacquesm 5y ago
As opposed to all those other customers who are not good faith actors?
- scrollaway 5y ago
  You’re trying to be snarky to GP, why exactly? Yes there are bad faith actors that might try to get some free cash out of cloud refunds. And other customers can also be good faith actors and included in the assertion. The post applies to everyone and I’d second it. Ask nicely for a refund in these situations, the worst that can happen is they say no. Where did they say that “only Troy Hunt shall receive a refund, for only Troy Hunt is a good faith actor, so say we all”?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    No snark intended. It's just that I would assume that all customers of such services are in principle good faith actors, not just Troy. The one thing that is special about Troy is that he is providing a service for the public good but that has nothing to do with being 'good faith' or not.
  - fastball 5y ago
    The point is that if they give refunds to all the good actors they won't make any money.
    - LeonB 5y ago
      Only if their regular services run at a loss and their business model relies on people making mistakes. But Azure’s regular prices are definitely high enough that they’re not a loss leader.
    - ssully 5y ago
      If you have a long time customer (especially one who brings in as much good publicity as Troy Hunt) and you look at their billing history this spike would be a clear anomaly. Writing off an $8k bill to keep a customer around and happy for years to come is worth more than that bill.
    - ska 5y ago
      > The point is that if they give refunds to all the good actors they won't make any money. That assumes the only way they make money is on peoples understandable mistakes or lack of care. Doesn't seem to be the case for these services (unlike, say, many gym subscriptions). It seems far more likely that if they refunded all the well documented issues like this one, their bottom line wouldn't be impacted.
  - tpetry 5y ago
    The response was snarky but it's meaning is true. Troy Hunt will get the refund without any problems because he is a public figure. But if a John Doe will make the same mistake he can only hope someone at AWS/Azure/GCP will lift his fees too - which is not guaranteed!
    - coryrc 5y ago
      I think there's a dozen people in this thread who have gotten refunds and not a person saying they were refused?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
SoapSeller 5y ago
I'll second that. I've seen several cases on both Azure and AWS that bills got weaved after someone opened support ticket starting with "oops, I just did..."
asadlionpk 5y ago
OP do this! It works, they are usually very generous (same for gcloud!)
- goodguyamericun 5y ago
  Op is Troy hunt, an ms MVP. You can bet there are people from MS doing it for him as soon as they got wind
0x008 5y ago
> Secondly, there's cost alerts. I really should have had this in place much earlier as it helps guard against any resource in Azure suddenly driving up the cost. He did not enable alerts.
- sylens 5y ago
  Every online course that requires you to use a public cloud to deploy something should first have you set up a billing alert that notifies you when costs start to creep past something reasonable, like $20 or $50 (depending on the course and work involved).
Fomite 5y ago
I had this happen to me once on Digital Ocean, and I contacted them - they were rather understanding that the bill I had was clearly "atypical for my account and not intended" and refunded it.
gurraman 5y ago
A developer on a team I worked with many years ago accidentally committed our AWS keys in a repo. Got a $30k bill due to a an enormous amount of EC2-instances being spawned. We contacted AWS and they were very understanding and reduced the bill to $50.
ramraj07 5y ago
I got an $800 aws expense (one line item) waived after I contacted them and they asked me to explain why it happened and how I’ll prevent it from happening in the future. I think it’s a once per account thing they’d probably do and Troy should definitely do it.
jillesvangurp 5y ago
Yep, we had an incident with Mongo cloud where a bug in their synchronization protocols for Mongo Realm resulted in an insane amount of traffic. This was a development cluster with almost no application load somehow pumping around many TB over the course of a few days. The bill was many thousands of dollars. Their support did the right thing. And we actually ended up with some credits because we were having a rough time with bugs in their software. Ultimately, we gave up on Mongo Realm because it was just not working as advertised for us (high CPU usage on the device, lots of bandwidth, we experienced data loss in the managed cloud storage, etc.). But their support team was great. Their interests is keeping you as a long term customer. So, they will help you if they can. Unexpectedly high bills like that can end the relation in no time. And 10K is not a lot on a yearly basis. That's a few months of normal usage for lots of companies. So, protecting that revenue is worth something to them. That's also worth realizing when you deal with cloud providers: you are spending non trivial amounts of money on their services and support is part of that deal.
tinus_hn 5y ago
Also there is 0% chance serving this traffic cost Microsoft anything near $10000.
quartz 5y ago
100% do this. Azure has a surprisingly responsive billing support team and will likely eat this as goodwill (honestly with this on the front page of HN they'll probably do it proactively). Just open a ticket in the portal.

jacquesm 5y ago

As opposed to all those other customers who are not good faith actors?

scrollaway 5y ago
You’re trying to be snarky to GP, why exactly? Yes there are bad faith actors that might try to get some free cash out of cloud refunds. And other customers can also be good faith actors and included in the assertion. The post applies to everyone and I’d second it. Ask nicely for a refund in these situations, the worst that can happen is they say no. Where did they say that “only Troy Hunt shall receive a refund, for only Troy Hunt is a good faith actor, so say we all”?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  No snark intended. It's just that I would assume that all customers of such services are in principle good faith actors, not just Troy. The one thing that is special about Troy is that he is providing a service for the public good but that has nothing to do with being 'good faith' or not.
- fastball 5y ago
  The point is that if they give refunds to all the good actors they won't make any money.
  - LeonB 5y ago
    Only if their regular services run at a loss and their business model relies on people making mistakes. But Azure’s regular prices are definitely high enough that they’re not a loss leader.
  - ssully 5y ago
    If you have a long time customer (especially one who brings in as much good publicity as Troy Hunt) and you look at their billing history this spike would be a clear anomaly. Writing off an $8k bill to keep a customer around and happy for years to come is worth more than that bill.
  - ska 5y ago
    > The point is that if they give refunds to all the good actors they won't make any money. That assumes the only way they make money is on peoples understandable mistakes or lack of care. Doesn't seem to be the case for these services (unlike, say, many gym subscriptions). It seems far more likely that if they refunded all the well documented issues like this one, their bottom line wouldn't be impacted.
- tpetry 5y ago
  The response was snarky but it's meaning is true. Troy Hunt will get the refund without any problems because he is a public figure. But if a John Doe will make the same mistake he can only hope someone at AWS/Azure/GCP will lift his fees too - which is not guaranteed!
  - coryrc 5y ago
    I think there's a dozen people in this thread who have gotten refunds and not a person saying they were refused?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

SoapSeller 5y ago

I'll second that. I've seen several cases on both Azure and AWS that bills got weaved after someone opened support ticket starting with "oops, I just did..."

asadlionpk 5y ago

OP do this! It works, they are usually very generous (same for gcloud!)

goodguyamericun 5y ago
Op is Troy hunt, an ms MVP. You can bet there are people from MS doing it for him as soon as they got wind

0x008 5y ago

> Secondly, there's cost alerts. I really should have had this in place much earlier as it helps guard against any resource in Azure suddenly driving up the cost. He did not enable alerts.

sylens 5y ago
Every online course that requires you to use a public cloud to deploy something should first have you set up a billing alert that notifies you when costs start to creep past something reasonable, like $20 or $50 (depending on the course and work involved).

Fomite 5y ago

I had this happen to me once on Digital Ocean, and I contacted them - they were rather understanding that the bill I had was clearly "atypical for my account and not intended" and refunded it.

gurraman 5y ago

A developer on a team I worked with many years ago accidentally committed our AWS keys in a repo. Got a $30k bill due to a an enormous amount of EC2-instances being spawned. We contacted AWS and they were very understanding and reduced the bill to $50.

ramraj07 5y ago

I got an $800 aws expense (one line item) waived after I contacted them and they asked me to explain why it happened and how I’ll prevent it from happening in the future. I think it’s a once per account thing they’d probably do and Troy should definitely do it.

jillesvangurp 5y ago

Yep, we had an incident with Mongo cloud where a bug in their synchronization protocols for Mongo Realm resulted in an insane amount of traffic. This was a development cluster with almost no application load somehow pumping around many TB over the course of a few days. The bill was many thousands of dollars. Their support did the right thing. And we actually ended up with some credits because we were having a rough time with bugs in their software. Ultimately, we gave up on Mongo Realm because it was just not working as advertised for us (high CPU usage on the device, lots of bandwidth, we experienced data loss in the managed cloud storage, etc.). But their support team was great. Their interests is keeping you as a long term customer. So, they will help you if they can. Unexpectedly high bills like that can end the relation in no time. And 10K is not a lot on a yearly basis. That's a few months of normal usage for lots of companies. So, protecting that revenue is worth something to them. That's also worth realizing when you deal with cloud providers: you are spending non trivial amounts of money on their services and support is part of that deal.

tinus_hn 5y ago

Also there is 0% chance serving this traffic cost Microsoft anything near $10000.

quartz 5y ago

100% do this. Azure has a surprisingly responsive billing support team and will likely eat this as goodwill (honestly with this on the front page of HN they'll probably do it proactively). Just open a ticket in the portal.