[benjaminwootton]

AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach.

I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding.

Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it tidied up whilst I’m incurring significant costs.

The whole billing stuff is complex and opaque and there aren’t enough controls and limits on spend. I feel like I need to dedicate 1 x FTE at least on AWS cost control which is a high cost for a small business.

As a CTO, I’ve previously influenced $millions in spend on AWS, but would be very nervous putting my reputation on the line to spend big with them in future. I’m frankly losing trust in their commercial approach.

[Terretta]

Anecdata, but my experience as CTO of a startup, a hedge fund, and a bank has been the opposite.

I’ve never had an unexpected cost they didn’t readily credit back, provided we were taking the recommended and reasonably easy steps to keep on top of costs and limits.

[cube00]

The problem is relying on this "good will" and "one time only" to credit back compared with having a way to set hard billing limits so you don't need to have this conversation as a part of your business as usual. Mistakes will always happen with something as complex as this and that's what billing and rate limits are supposed to protect your against.

[vbezhenar]

I made a mistake with glacier (old transfer pricing model was horribly unobvious, I think that they changed it since then) which costed me few hundred bucks instead of expected few pennies. I asked for refund, because I read about people in the same situation being refunded but all I got from support is pricing page and FAQ link. I don't expect any goodwill from Amazon, I'm not the kind of person who would fight over refund, so I just paid and forgot about it, but had some bad taste in my mouth.

[glenngillen]

I used to work at AWS, and my experience helping customers with these types of issues was almost without exception a credit/refund would be applied for any honest mistake that had corrective or preventative steps already in flight.

I say almost without exception, because the one case that wasn’t true was a Glacier transfer case like you described (except an order of magnitude larger in cost). We made it right for the customer in other ways. But I’m still seething years later about how poor and experience it was and how uncharacteristically unmoving and not customer obsessed whatever the decision making chain were on that particular issue. Just wanted to let you know you’re not alone, and it’s not just customers that had a bad taste from that experience.

[qaq]

Whats your monthly spend? I used to work for an org with 50K monthly spend none cared at AWS about us. Now I work for a big org with very serious spend and it's night and day we can get access to eng. quickly we have regular meetings with PMs and get our requests for AWS features put onto roadmap etc.

[donmcronald]

I bet that's the case for the GP. They probably spend millions of dollars, so they get catered to and think it's the same treatment normal people get. I call it VIP vision. People don't even realize they're getting special treatment and assume their results are merit based rather than money based.

[Terretta]

I mentioned 3 wildly different orgs for that reason.

[toeknee123]

We recently helped a small client of ours discover a cost increase where AWS RETROACTIVELY increased their costs for a service near the end of the month for previous days without letting them know.

We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices.

(I'm a co-founder of CloudForecast)

[scrollaway]

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

[snapcaster]

I don't think it's an extraordinary claim but some evidence would be nice because the comment made me paranoid

[CSDude]

I run at AWS for 5 years and use more than 25 services and keep an eye at a huge sum very carefully year never seen this happening so it's pretty extraordinary for me. I dont ever remember AWS increasing prices for any service at all.

[scrollaway]

It really is. AWS never increases prices, let alone retroactively. They make such massive margins where they do make money they absolutely do not need to use underhanded tactics to milk their customers who are more than happy to hand out money of their own volition.

They give out hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit just so you can use their crack.

The GP's comment's claim isn't just extraordinary, it's out there with "I saw aliens and they probed me". Possible? Physically, yes. Unlikely? Quite the understatement.

[CSDude]

Which service and whay API?

[hfern]

What was the service that they retroactively increased the cost of?

[aeyes]

At least you can do something about open S3 buckets with relative ease, I got slammed by people scanning zones on Route53.

The way Route53 pricing works, you could get a 1000$ bill any day - for DNS... Having just a single domain on there is enough.

[rodgerd]

> and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach.

Ironically the Oracle cloud seems more price-reasonable (for now).

[murgindrag]

The Oracle approach is:

- Good terms with proprietary lock-in.

- Milk that cow for all it's worth.

It's more nuanced than that -- I gave an oversimplified model -- but I've never seen anyone come out ahead doing business with Oracle long-term.