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Warning: most cloud providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) require you to accept unlimited liability to use their services. If you're running a business and you

Warning: most cloud providers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) require you to accept unlimited liability to use their services. If you're running a business and you have lawyers, then fair enough — just play the game. But for individuals, it seems crazy that so many of us accept this sort of thing. Good luck contesting the charge with your credit card company when you already agreed to a contract that said Google could bill you thousands of dollars and then you used thousands of dollars worth of their service. Big cloud providers are not your friend. They do not care if they destroy the lives of you and your family, unless it's happening so often that it's making mainstream news. My advice is to go and delete your cloud accounts, and only use services that offer hard spending caps, and ideally prepaid accounts. Maybe this doesn't leave many options. Oh well. Maybe if you can't afford big lawyers then you also can't afford the risks of using big cloud.

nothttparchive 3y ago
Yup, I'm already having to pay legal fees - which is why you have a biz lawyer on retainer to start with - but I'm not sure I have any standing.
- jeffparsons 3y ago
  IANAL, but if this happened to me I would be gathering as many examples as I could of this having happened to other people. The angle being: Google knows this is a huge issue. Effectively, they know that they have (presumably accidentally) created a really dangerous trap for small players, and have chosen to do nothing about it. In some jurisdictions I think that reduces the legitimacy of their claim that you actually owe them money. EDIT: Even better, focus on the examples where Google "forgave" the debt; you could argue that those examples prove that Google knows it's at least partly their fault.
  - Affric 3y ago
    I would love to see an example of this working. I know that if it did work it would change the opportunity cost of forgiving debt in these cases dramatically
    - jeffparsons 3y ago
      I honestly think it would be better if they didn't have the option to "forgive the debt" — at least without following up by eliminating the trap that created said debt. How often is one of these accidental debts created? How often do customers just pay up because it's small enough that it's not worth fighting? How often does AWS (or Google or whoever) decide whether to forgive the debt based on PR damage control rather than the legitimacy of the debt? Jeez I hope someone leaks those numbers one day. It reminds me of all those horror stories of hospital visits in the USA, where the first bill you receive is just a test to see if they can squeeze that much out of you, but if you know what you're doing or just can't pay then the actual bill is way lower. It's all just yucky. If big cloud providers couldn't selectively choose which of these debts to enforce, I bet there would be a media shitstorm and then they would suddenly discover that it's not all thaaaaat hard to implement real time billing and hard caps after all.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        Well, the "trap" is the lack of hard limits which, if implemented, would enable some companies to blow up their businesses. Which arguably is a better outcome than people who can't afford it getting big bills. But it is a tradeoff even aside from the providers arguably collecting some money people didn't intend to give them.
  - nothttparchive 3y ago
    The FTC is already investigating: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2023/03/inquiry-cloud-computing-business-practices-federal-trade-commission-seeking-public-comments https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202... I think we (the developer community) need to start pushing back against this abuse, it's getting out of control. The thing that bothers me the most is I caught this $14k charge b/c I'm a small fry and that money matters to me. How many big accounts just wouldn't notice that? I can't help but think a very non-trivial % of all cloud revenue is just obscure fees that nobody notices - engineers doing the engineering, accounts receivable pays the bills, and the cloud providers get fat.
AdamJacobMuller 3y ago
All of the cloud services I have are setup only with privacy.com cards. I have each individual cards limited to just above what the monthly expected spend is. Even if there's a (reasonable) spike I can see it and I have to take manual action before the charge will go through. Can not recommend privacy.com enough.
- ihattendorf 3y ago
  Doesn't stop them from trying to collect after the transaction is declined. It's not a prepaid service, you're agreeing to pay the charges _after_ you've used the service. Will they pursue? Do they have enough info to purse? Who knows, but they can if they want to.
- myself248 3y ago
  That's not what privacy.com does or is for. They advertise it, but I've had transactions blow right through the façade. Specifically, the New York Times, after my trial subscription ended and I watched the stupendously-expensive charges bounce, they kept trying and eventually tried a different way and it went through. I emailed support, and here's what I got back: > Hi, $firstname. I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch base with you to explain what happened. > It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post" by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts and completes the transaction without an authorization — it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block.
  - 12345hn6789 3y ago
    >It's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block Have you found a site that does "block" this? Did you communicate with your credit card company about this? I am wondering
    - 3y ago
romeros 3y ago
This is just a single data point but I had a surprise bill with Google. I talked to the support and got it waived off. I used Amazon EC2 instances for years and I always felt in control. There were never any surprises. I knew even in the worst case situation I would be okay because I had faith in the Amazon support. With Google I felt insecure. I never played with any of Google cloud services since then. Amazon's customer first policy is really true. They try their absolute best to make sure there are no surprises to a great extent. Even the UI is very intuitive.
- theolivenbaum 3y ago
  Same here - incidentally was also one of the weirdest interactions with customer support I've ever had. I suspect the first point of contact was some sort of LLM/chatbot that desperately wanted to make sure I was feeling fine and that there was nothing to worry about. When I was forwarded to the billing support team the interaction went back to normal - couple of messages back and forth and some homework to set the real budget limit (the quota is just for alarms) and they waved the charge.
- tw04 3y ago
  >Amazon's customer first policy is really true. Which part of customer first drove their egress fee policies?
  - zer00eyz 3y ago
    The part that was ALWAYS there. Egress is basically all outbound traffic. The fee was always this. Dont act shocked when it doesn't go down when you have buyers remorse.
- httparchive 3y ago
  Yeah, I have spent much more than $14k to date and would have spent much more over time, losing my business isn't rational. I think it's just another "Google can't do customer support to literally save their life" example.
- reaperman 3y ago

nothttparchive 3y ago

Yup, I'm already having to pay legal fees - which is why you have a biz lawyer on retainer to start with - but I'm not sure I have any standing.

jeffparsons 3y ago
IANAL, but if this happened to me I would be gathering as many examples as I could of this having happened to other people. The angle being: Google knows this is a huge issue. Effectively, they know that they have (presumably accidentally) created a really dangerous trap for small players, and have chosen to do nothing about it. In some jurisdictions I think that reduces the legitimacy of their claim that you actually owe them money. EDIT: Even better, focus on the examples where Google "forgave" the debt; you could argue that those examples prove that Google knows it's at least partly their fault.
- Affric 3y ago
  I would love to see an example of this working. I know that if it did work it would change the opportunity cost of forgiving debt in these cases dramatically
  - jeffparsons 3y ago
    I honestly think it would be better if they didn't have the option to "forgive the debt" — at least without following up by eliminating the trap that created said debt. How often is one of these accidental debts created? How often do customers just pay up because it's small enough that it's not worth fighting? How often does AWS (or Google or whoever) decide whether to forgive the debt based on PR damage control rather than the legitimacy of the debt? Jeez I hope someone leaks those numbers one day. It reminds me of all those horror stories of hospital visits in the USA, where the first bill you receive is just a test to see if they can squeeze that much out of you, but if you know what you're doing or just can't pay then the actual bill is way lower. It's all just yucky. If big cloud providers couldn't selectively choose which of these debts to enforce, I bet there would be a media shitstorm and then they would suddenly discover that it's not all thaaaaat hard to implement real time billing and hard caps after all.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Well, the "trap" is the lack of hard limits which, if implemented, would enable some companies to blow up their businesses. Which arguably is a better outcome than people who can't afford it getting big bills. But it is a tradeoff even aside from the providers arguably collecting some money people didn't intend to give them.
- nothttparchive 3y ago
  The FTC is already investigating: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/2023/03/inquiry-cloud-computing-business-practices-federal-trade-commission-seeking-public-comments https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202... I think we (the developer community) need to start pushing back against this abuse, it's getting out of control. The thing that bothers me the most is I caught this $14k charge b/c I'm a small fry and that money matters to me. How many big accounts just wouldn't notice that? I can't help but think a very non-trivial % of all cloud revenue is just obscure fees that nobody notices - engineers doing the engineering, accounts receivable pays the bills, and the cloud providers get fat.

AdamJacobMuller 3y ago

All of the cloud services I have are setup only with privacy.com cards. I have each individual cards limited to just above what the monthly expected spend is. Even if there's a (reasonable) spike I can see it and I have to take manual action before the charge will go through. Can not recommend privacy.com enough.

ihattendorf 3y ago
Doesn't stop them from trying to collect after the transaction is declined. It's not a prepaid service, you're agreeing to pay the charges _after_ you've used the service. Will they pursue? Do they have enough info to purse? Who knows, but they can if they want to.
myself248 3y ago
That's not what privacy.com does or is for. They advertise it, but I've had transactions blow right through the façade. Specifically, the New York Times, after my trial subscription ended and I watched the stupendously-expensive charges bounce, they kept trying and eventually tried a different way and it went through. I emailed support, and here's what I got back: > Hi, $firstname. I've been reviewing your dispute and wanted to touch base with you to explain what happened. > It appears that the disputed charge is a "force post" by the merchant. This happens when a merchant cannot collect funds for a transaction after repeated attempts and completes the transaction without an authorization — it's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block.
- 12345hn6789 3y ago
  >It's literally an unauthorized transaction that's against payment card network rules. It's a pretty sneaky move used by some merchants, and unfortunately, it's not something Privacy can block Have you found a site that does "block" this? Did you communicate with your credit card company about this? I am wondering
  - 3y ago

romeros 3y ago

This is just a single data point but I had a surprise bill with Google. I talked to the support and got it waived off. I used Amazon EC2 instances for years and I always felt in control. There were never any surprises. I knew even in the worst case situation I would be okay because I had faith in the Amazon support. With Google I felt insecure. I never played with any of Google cloud services since then. Amazon's customer first policy is really true. They try their absolute best to make sure there are no surprises to a great extent. Even the UI is very intuitive.

theolivenbaum 3y ago
Same here - incidentally was also one of the weirdest interactions with customer support I've ever had. I suspect the first point of contact was some sort of LLM/chatbot that desperately wanted to make sure I was feeling fine and that there was nothing to worry about. When I was forwarded to the billing support team the interaction went back to normal - couple of messages back and forth and some homework to set the real budget limit (the quota is just for alarms) and they waved the charge.
tw04 3y ago
>Amazon's customer first policy is really true. Which part of customer first drove their egress fee policies?
- zer00eyz 3y ago
  The part that was ALWAYS there. Egress is basically all outbound traffic. The fee was always this. Dont act shocked when it doesn't go down when you have buyers remorse.
httparchive 3y ago
Yeah, I have spent much more than $14k to date and would have spent much more over time, losing my business isn't rational. I think it's just another "Google can't do customer support to literally save their life" example.
reaperman 3y ago