[tgtweak]

Use a disposable credit card (like lastcard or privacy) and set the limit to $5. Add it to your account, and the max they can charge is $5. If they let you run past it, the billing will fail, and if they don't shut it off it's on their dime.

To everyone claiming "ohhh that's illegal/unethical" I say to you: take it in your favor for once. For every 100 clients aws bills unexpectedly and with no controls in place to mitigate, you can be the 1 who gets a free month of service. They will not pursue you for $5. Imagine making the argument for welfare on a company that is worth a trillion dollars.

[humanistbot]

> To everyone claiming "ohhh that's illegal/unethical" I say to you: take it in your favor for once.

The rationale against doing this is as much practical as it is moral --- unless you're just doing this once for a single month and don't care if your account gets banned. AWS isn't like an auto-renewing subscription, where if the card declines, your service is cut off. They won't charge the card with a $5 limit until the end of the billing period. If you rack up more than $5 in charges in a billing period, you will be in debt to Amazon. They will certainly ban your account, so you'd have to make a new throwaway account with a new disposable CC each month.

[tgtweak]

You'd be humbled (perhaps not) by how little human capital gets assigned to review and correct anything under 5-figures at AWS. The account gets put into overdue and the services stay paused, you get an email every so often (if you even put in a valid email). Pretending they have a crack team of hundreds of analysts sitting there waiting to ban every account associated to an IP for $5 is pretty farcical. I have several 6-figure AWS accounts at present, and I can barely get ahold of a human being when there are issues related to wire payments not being applied to an account, let alone imagine they'd have anyone worrying about this beyond putting a dev on it to set up an ignore filter on such accounts. They have a manual process to allow any accounts to spend above $2000 or $5000 (I can't remember) where you fill out a credit application and they vet you to see if you are indeed good for it before allowing you to provision further. If you default on that, they will carefully weight the cost of collecting you or even reporting it to a credit bureau vs the amount due.

Not advocating for mass fraud here, or even petty fraud, just making it a bit more fair to those who have 0 provisions in the platform to prevent involuntary overspending.

[kobalsky]

> Imagine making the argument for welfare on a company that is worth a trillion dollars

You are not doing delivering some sort of poetic justice, you are just showing your lack of self-preservation instinct. For your own welfare, just don't poke the bear. You don't wanna get blacklisted for doing some dumb crap that will come bite you in the ass someday.

There are enough stories running around of people getting their job accounts banned by association for pulling idiotic stunts like these, and we don't know what crap Amazon will be running in the future.

[aaronjl]

The only problem is that they'll let you go negative for awhile before they shut you off. Then they won't let you use any services until you pay your balance. So unless you're willing to make a new account each time you go over your $5 max, you'll still be paying for the extra usage

[dangus]

This is a good way to just get banned until you pay.

AWS bills work a lot like postpaid phone bills. When you use the service you agree to pay the bill for usage.

Your suggestion is kind of like saying “If your card declines you don’t have to pay for your meal.” Not really true.

In my experience AWS support has been good about reversing accidental/fraudulent usage charges and helping to prevent them in the future.

[zhynn]

I have been very happy with privacy.com for this very purpose.