[philihp]

AWS understands lifetime value of the user, not just the account. I've had mistakes ON MY PERSONAL ACCOUNT that were in no way connected to my work. Times when I was just experimenting. They refunded it in full. I've also heard from STUDENTS who may not ever get into infra work that they're still reasonable and lenient.

You would be absolute mad to use any other platform. AWS gets it right on the customer service front. Amazon, perhaps deeply less so... but AWS? amazing.

[Mizoguchi]

It was not our experience.

Tech support was always friendly, polite and apologetic, but could not provide help.

The attack was way beyond their level of skill and they insisted in providing instructions that were completely helpless, all manual actions to fight a full scale extremely vicious automated attack (change password, delete instances, disable regions, delete roles, etc).

AWS security got it done in one hour, but it took months to get to them.

[rurp]

A friend of mine had a similar experience when he was just learning. He accidentally racked up a large bill (for a student), contacted support, and they forgave the charges.

That's not to say that Amazon is being altruistic here, I think it just makes good business sense. Foregoing a few thousand dollars for even a tiny chance that a student's future self decides to use AWS for a multi-million spend project down the line is worth it.