[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.