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Comment by maxander | Hacker News Reader

This sort of story probably fully explains origins of the OP's lament (that AWS billing is so opaque that even internal Amazon teams can't figure it out.) Some AWS middle manager knows that if he orders better billing tools to be implemented, AWS income will drop; not significantly, but ~$700 multiplied by the number of AWS users might make enough of a dent to be noted in his performance report. In order to make this omission more plausible, even internal investigation tools (which would encourage infrastructural improvements that make user-facing tools easier to build) are neglected.

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But they didn't actually get the $700 they refunded it, along with spending who knows how many support hours along the way.

Maybe there enough people out there who don't notice a $700 overage to offset that, but it seems like there would at least be a visible decrease in support costs if they had a better system.

Part of retail sales is people not caring enough to spend the energy to return / get a refund. Even if this story resulted in a refund, there are probably 100 other who didn't bother because it wasn't worth their time.

I suspect that full refunds for user mistakes aren't entirely typical.

Not everyone has a high spend account and a rep who brags about their policy of refunding mistakes frequently enough to snipe them with "If you have a policy of refunding mistakes, then why didn't you?" in front of customers.

I would like to emphasize that I've chosen my words carefully: I don't know for certain that the rep intervened, but I made trouble, emailed him the information necessary to resolve my issue, and then my half refund became a full refund. Any connection between these dots is pure speculation on my part.

> user mistakes

The first 2 points in GP's post were Amazon's bugs. It's not a user mistake if the user fails to fix the vendor's bugs.

I am GP. I agree, of course, but when a company wants to blame the user, it usually finds a way.

Wild guess.. refunds happen in separate department, and do not affect his/hers KPI.

This is why it’s crucial to review employees against each of the _project_ goals that they aimed to deliver. You cannot judge all work equally, sometimes the appropriate outcomes can be not just orthogonal (has zero benefit with respect to performance metric “A”) but can even be detrimental (negative with respect to performance metric “A”) ... not handling this with something is what create these kind of problems.

AWS has a collection of tools which make it easier to detect and avoid accidental spend, and which make it easier to optimize purposeful spend.

These aren't controversial, even though they reduce revenue, because they improve the customer experience.

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