[0cf8612b2e1e]

> We would rather reverse your $20k bill and keep you alive

And as a customer, I never want to be in a position where I ever see $megabill. Maybe I might be able to get reversed if the gods smile upon me that day, but it would be incredibly stressful until I had resolutions. Seems an obvious blindside for “customer obsessed”. Anything I might host is practically a joke for which I would gladly have the provider pull the plug if billing suddenly spiked above pre-established threshold. I’ll take the downtime if it helps me sleep at night.

[wingleader]

I've had the exact polar opposite experience on any company running systems with paying customers. Usually it's "don't care what it costs, just fix it" which lines well with AWS' behaviour on this. When downtime costs tens of thousands of dollars _a minute_, people tend to stress less about some inefficiencies like this

[0cf8612b2e1e]

And those customers can choose to ignore the emergency billing shutoff. The rest of us need assurances we do not have an unlimited liability that could strike. My potential spend is under $1k per year. Vastly different cost considerations at play.

[spopejoy]

One qeustion is whether cheap cloud services even make sense for an AWS, as opposed to a Dreamhost (targetting smaller businesses/individuals specifically) or Hetzner/DO.

I would imagine AWSs profit is in servicing large clients using lots of CPU/bandwidth, so the only reason to even bother with small clients is some kind of low-probability funnel for the occasional startup that blows up. Or just a loss-leader strategy for market domination (but only if that small-biz experience is vastly superior to other clouds' offering).

One way or another, small businesses should never trust that big businesses are going to look out for them, for any number of "rational" reasons on the big biz side, especially if it's not clear you're their bread-and-butter.