Assuming you were incorporated and had a business account - declare bankruptcy and the bill goes away. I don’t understand why you would still pay the bill if you were going out of business anyway.
Why didn't I file bankruptcy? This happened in Australia and declaring bankruptcy was not the right thing to do - for many reasons, not the least of which it makes it much harder to operate as a director of a previously bankrupt company, but in the worst case my bank would have just gone after me as I'd given a personal guarantee.
Even in the United States, most small business loans require personal guarantees which narrowly override the corporate limited liability to make that guarantor liable for that debt if the company doesn't pay. There are some rare exceptions, and possibly more for startups funded by big-name VCs, but I don't know.
Scenario 1: Amazon will ask for the payment (if using cc); the bank will respond there are no funds in the account; Amazon deals directly with the company further directly, not with the bank, eventually getting payment order from the court. If the company went bankrupt meanwhile, Amazon might not get their money.
Scenario 2: Amazon will send the invoice; invoice will not get paid. After due date, Amazon will contact the company directly; bank doesn't even enter the picture, until collection order comes from the court. If the company went bankrupt meanwhile, Amazon might not get their money.
There's no scenario where some hypothetical loan would go straight to Amazon, unless Amazon has some instrument, that instruct the bank to pay them. Something like bank guarantee or promisory note, and uses them before declaring bankrupcy.
Were they in the US and funded by VCs? That kind of startup probably doesn't need to do this. Unsure about VC-funded businesses elsewhere. Many or even most small businesses without VC funding do take that kind of loan.
The real world is filled with barbershops, daycares, bars, clinics, PVC manufacturers etc
None of them get VC money.
When they need money, they go to a bank and usually have to place a PG in order to get funds.
Tech startups have it easy. Its all equity. You are not pledging your lifetime earnings on a business idea.
Once tech startups lose their upside potential (prob not anytime soon if ever), you will be sitting with the regular folk, those that pledge their skin and life to their business.
If a director becomes personally bankrupt (such as trying to be the good guy and using personal guarantees to take on company debts in an effort to scrape through) then they're banned from running a company until it clears. If they're the director of a company that goes bankrupt, I believe they get 2 chances (companies) before there's a chance of being banned from running more for a time.
Either way it might be nice to keep your options open, depending on your plans.
If that got to the right person on the right day and they knew it was going to kill the company, it seems likely to help. And combined with the fact that it would probably guarantee future revenue way off into the future...
I have never heard of a case where they wouldn’t give refunds. AWS is competing with the 95% of compute that is not running in the cloud (their own statistics). The last thing they want is a reputation that one mistake will bankrupt a business.
We had spot instances with a mistakenly high bid that incurred thousands overnight when the prices spiked. No refund offered.
I know several other companies that had expensive mistakes without refunds. There's probably a complex decision tree for these issues and I doubt anyone really knows outside of AWS.
> I have never heard of a case where they wouldn’t give refunds.
Really? Working in Southern California a few years ago, refund requests were refused ALL THE TIME. This is why there's a common belief that what you are charged you simply owe them, period.
It may be more progressive now, but let's not be revisionist.
I'm not the type to 'want to speak to the manager' for my self-imposed problems but the more I hear about people coming out ahead the more I think I need to change my ways.
I think you have to think of it a bit more from Amazon's perspective. If you accidentally burn through your entire startup capital and shut down, they lose. If the risk of this sort of thing becomes well-known, then startups will start using other services rather than AWS, and the small fraction that grow big will be less likely to use AWS.
Being an entitled jerk who blames other people for your own negligence is bad, and you shouldn't change that. But openly giving companies the opportunity to be kind (while admitting that it was entirely your fault) potentially helps both them and you.