Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. That's definitely not the culture that I'm experiencing every day or that we hold ourselves to. Our goal is to deliver a ton of value to customers. If we are not delivering value then it would not be in line with how we operate to want to charge you for that.
Out of curiosity, did you try contacting AWS support? Almost all customers I speak to love our support and the fact they can speak to an actual human. Of course I can't speak to the actual case as I'm just providing my personal opinion here, but I would not be surprised if support could fix this for you quickly and zero out any small balances that you accrued because you weren't able to access/use your account.
With all due respect, it has nothing to do with culture and more to do with business processes having rough edges. At AWS' scale, any rough edge is more than a rare edge case, since rarity flies out the window.
Spending more to provide better customer service (explicitly or implicitly through bugfixes) is not generally how this type of need is. Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.
> I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to.
We don't know whether OP has reached out to AWS support, but one can assume so since AWS is charging an account the user cannot log in to.
Further, it sounds like the user has found their own resolution, so the user isn't asking for _help_ on HN, more that they are registering poor experience in agreement with others. So, it is a rough UX edge.
> Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.
Yet by your very own comment you say that we don't know if he actually tried to contact support so there is no "clear gap in customer service provision".
The fact is, anyone who actually interacted with an AWS rep would tell you that they would delete the bucket and not charge you for it.
From my own experience, no you can't. All links to cknta t support require you to have an active AWS account. That defeats the purpose. YMMV as in maybe it's different today but that was my experience. And I was just trying to them to stop sending me spam after I had closed out my account.
It's weird to see hackers here posting this as AWS is literally the only web scale company I can actually talk to a person at to resolve rough edges.
This is both on retail side and AWS side.
My only request - do some more automated discovery and remediation tooling for VPC-classic accounts! It's annoying to figure out what needs to be handled there - give me a dashboard for this.
I'd really be curious how much money AWS makes on zero-usage accounts where someone spun up something and then forgot how to log in or delete it.
I've been paying $10/month for over a year on an EC2 (I think?) instance I spun up, and I still haven't had the time to go in and find it and delete it. I've tried several times (and even disputed the credit card charge one month).
I'll probably just end up cancelling this credit card. That would be a lot easier than figuring out how to stop AWS from charging me.
> I'll probably just end up cancelling this credit card. That would be a lot easier than figuring out how to stop AWS from charging me.
Nooooo no no no that is not true. If you cancel, this debt will follow you on your credit history and via collectors. Canceling a CC does not waive you of responsibility.
Just contact AWS support. Tell them your story. They’ll get your account closed and they’ll probably forgive whatever outstanding bill you have.
Please don’t just run away from the bill, you’re just setting yourself up for pain later.
I've actually contacted them via email multiple times, and they never respond.
At this point, they're legally committing fraud. I don't see how closing a credit card that has regular fraudulent transactions is wrong, or likely to cause problems later on.
> I've actually contacted them via email multiple times, and they never respond.
> They are absolutely not commiting fraud - that is a total lie.
Lie isn't the word you're looking for when you disagree with someone.
If they never respond they aren't engaging with the OP to figure out what this person want's. If the OP even contested the charges AWS has been warned that someone isn't happy with the contract. Both by personal email and by the credit card company.
> They are absolutely not commiting fraud - that is a total lie.
If I write an email to them asking them to cancel an account, doesn't that constitute legal termination of my authorization to continue service or charge me?
Unless the service agreement I signed specifies a specific way to cancel an account - in that case my agreement to it constitutes authorization unless I jump through their hoops. Argh.
I'd login and go look at your most recent bill, this should bring up the bill from September 2021, for you [1].
That should give you a breakdown of where the charges are coming from, specifically which region an EC2 instance might be running in. Once you can figure out which region it's in, you can go to the EC2 dashboard for that region [2] and start terminating instances.
Having said this, AWS should seriously have a way to say "close this account and delete/stop everything associated with it." Having to spelunk through bills and the AWS console to figure out what you're getting charged for is a joke.
How hard is it to stop an EC2 instance? It's literally 3 or 4 clicks from when you login. As for forgetting how to login, if I give some company my credit card info, I damn well make sure I know how to login when I need to.
Why can't we bill them for wasted time and stolen money, send those bills to collection and ruin their credit? Something seems unfair about the power dynamic.
Well, you can document your attempts to close the account and report it to the police. It's just a lot of work and you will only gain a document you can use to press your credit card issuer into rejecting the payments.
Also, if they do send your debit to collectors, you can go to a court and ask for the debit to be dropped and for them to pay damages. That is a lot more work, but if they are clearly on the wrong will get you something.
Theoretically. I don't know in what cases Amazon might do either of these things. If you're not in the US, that's certainly another layer of barrier.
But yes, in the US anyway, whether you legally owe someone money or not and they can legally collect on it is not controlled by whether you've cancelled a credit card.
I'm completely amazed that such a large group of developers have decided to put their personal credit card on Amazon. Foolish choices lead to bad outcomes.
When does billing by the hour for storage/everything start to seem appealing?
I wanted to use ECS/Fargate earlier this year and the deploy kept failing. It was an issue on my end, but the infuriating thing was that Cloudwatch didn't have any logs 80% of the time. Like, at random: I could click the redeploy button 5 times and 4 of those times wouldn't have logs while one would. Of course, they charged me per deploy. I ended up running up a bill of $100 before I said screw it and used DigitalOcean instead (where I had logs consistently and was able to debug my container deploy within about 10 minutes and only a few cents of a bill).
I had a similar issue when moving our stack to ECS Fargate. logs wouldn’t tell us anything other than ‘application was terminated’ within seconds of it booting. The most helpful thing was looking at the reason given for the container shutting down(which still was a difficult riddle for a Fargate noob).
In our case, it was a message saying something like ‘container timed out’ originally making us think it was a network issue. We ended up tracing it back to our app sometimes taking 21-30 seconds to fully boot, instead of the 20 second limit Fargate had for health checks. So even though the container did end up booting, Fargate was already waiting for it to start so it could kill it.
Yeah, my issue was something similar. When I moved it to DigitalOcean, I was getting logs consistently (from my application) and I traced it to something that was misconfigured on my end, which was causing health checks to fail. It took a total of about 10 minutes to track and fix on DO, while I had already spent 2 days (and the $100) trying to figure it out on AWS.
I mean, the issue was my fault, but AWS made it incredibly painful to figure out and fix and was not helpful at all. I decided that day that I will never use AWS again, unless I have someone with a lot of AWS experience on the team (and even then, only if I have a good reason to use AWS, in my case there is a reason why AWS would perhaps be desirable in the future but not enough to go through the pain again myself).
There's nothing particular about Amazon here, any company or person you owe money to in the US (can't speak for other countries) can take you to court or turn your debt over to a collection agency.
I haven't heard of Amazon specifically ever doing either of these things.
Or am I missing what you're saying is particular to Amazon and relevant here?
And you use the Fair Credit Reporting Act to force them to validate the debt or cease collection activity. For small amounts they will not go through legal hoops.
Often yes. And perhaps more importantly: you don't need a SSN to send a debt to collections or report it to a credit bureau (though of course it helps).
Legally shmegally. Just download one of the many troves of hacked databases. I'm sure you'll find the data you need somewhere. Or hire a 3rd party that does stuff on your behalf. Now you have plausible deniability in that you're the one not doing it.
Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. That's definitely not the culture that I'm experiencing every day or that we hold ourselves to. Our goal is to deliver a ton of value to customers. If we are not delivering value then it would not be in line with how we operate to want to charge you for that.
Out of curiosity, did you try contacting AWS support? Almost all customers I speak to love our support and the fact they can speak to an actual human. Of course I can't speak to the actual case as I'm just providing my personal opinion here, but I would not be surprised if support could fix this for you quickly and zero out any small balances that you accrued because you weren't able to access/use your account.