[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.