[sam0x17]

> why would they just eat those costs?

Beacuse the public indignation directed at cloud companies who don't always eat the costs in these situations vastly outweighs the cost of simply eating these costs, at least for cloud companies at the top tier of economies of scale (AWS, GCP, Azure, etc)

If AWS didn't always eat costs like this, startups might think twice before using AWS, etc, etc.

[kelnos]

Exactly this. Cloud providers have to acknowledge that building software on their platforms is necessarily complex, and inevitably bugs can cause extremely undesirable behavior. These providers are already charging a premium for instant, on-demand provisioning and nearly limitless pay-as-you-go resources, and know that there are too few guardrails in place to prevent accidental runaway situations.

"Goodwill" has value to a corporation. Taking a hard line against legitimate mistakes that anyone (yes, anyone) can make costs them goodwill, and costs them customers.

And beyond that, while accidental/fraudulent usage doesn't cost them $0, the services are marked up to the point that they probably doesn't really lose that much by forgiving the charges.