AWS charged me $500 over 4 years for a “free” micro instance | Hacker News Reader

AWS charged me $500 over 4 years for a “free” micro instance

4 pointsrmtech16 comments

AWS "free" offerings can cost a lot more than you think - I tried out a "free" t2.micro instance in 2016 and received a surprise bill for $500 recently.

It turns out that AWS does not terminate unused free instances when the 12 month free trial runs out - they will happily bill you until the end of time, irrespective if you ever log in to their service, run code, etc.

When I got in touch with AWS customer services about this they just told me to get lost.

Legally AWS may be skirting around consumer protection regulations with the way they market AWS free as free credits rather than a free service.

There are laws like 15 USC Ch. 110: ONLINE SHOPPER PROTECTION §8403. "Negative option marketing on the Internet" which are designed to prevent companies from automatically and silently upgrading customers from a free trial to a paid product.

Companies like Amazon will keep doing this for as long as we let them get away with it - do what you can to protect yourself from outrageous costs; use a prepaid credit card with a limited balance when signing up online, and spread the word about AWS' bad behavior.

While I don't like the business practice, it is a very common business practice to give something for free for a time and then bill you if you don't cancel it. There is nothing illegal about it as it's all spelled out in the terms and conditions you didn't read.

I avoid engaging in these offers entirely. If a company tells me it's free then fine but I won't be providing a credit card number or any other billing related information. It's not free if you ask to hold on to my money is just a scam so you can bill me later.

I deal with this with Delta's Clear program. They say it's free for diamond medallion status, but they always want my credit card. That's not free then. That's just you're not charging me now and hoping I forget later.

The credit card rules converting the free trials to paid got a bit more strict recently, e.g. notifying the users before it starts https://blog.recurly.com/visas-new-free-trial-mandate-what-y...

Solid advice. I wish I'd heard this back in 2016. Thanks.

AWS went from no invoice, no billing email for 3 years to a single $500 invoice covering multiple years? No previous contact? At 0.0116 USD/h that's about 720 days, I'm surprised they wouldn't invoice sooner.

Something is either missing or just isn't accurate in the OPs description. The likelihood of this happening is extremely remote at best but frankly IMO highly improbable period. I honestly don't believe this happened as described, but that isn't to say surprise bills don't exist on all the cloud providers. So I could see maybe the OP got a $500 bill unexpectedly, but most likely because someone found/stole an old account credential out of a public git repository (or similar) and the OP just didn't realize/know it. That makes a ton more sense and I have seen it happen quite a few times, it is an honest but costly mistake. If that is the case though, usually AWS is wiling to work with you if you just talk to them and are honest. So I am not saying the OP didn't necessarily get a surprise bill but maybe he/she is misunderstanding what happened or is just anti-AWS for whatever reason and is trying to make some point.

I have been using AWS almost since the public release and I have had a few clients who hit hard times and didn't pay their AWS invoice timely over the years, a few more clients where things went from free to need to pay and they didn't. Each of them had services terminated after 30 to 60 days max, usually a smaller dollar amount AWS will let go for ~2 months but you will have received numerous emails from them first before they will terminate the account. Also, if you contact AWS and ask for a payment extension they are also usually pretty decent about it, but no, they wouldn't allow an unpaid instance to run for years. If by some chance this happened (highly doubt it) it could be a software error on AWS's side and raising it to AWS would likely result in them forgiving the bill and fixing the issue because they don't want to miss out of revenue either.

My last soap box point, AWS is very clear you are responsible for the instance/service termination to avoid charges, so is Azure and GCP for that matter. They all are clear on how it works, you are responsible for reading the information and complying with the rules. IME all the cloud provides give you some latitude on payments though because if they were too aggressive with account suspensions/terminations they could get smacked for that as well, possibly even sued over lost revenue etc, so they have significant warnings/out reach which document their attempts too contact you and resolve it before they terminate to avoid that scenario.

No, it definitely wasn't a stolen credential. It's just ~$15/month for 4-5 years, which I didn't notice due to changing banks and an international move.

Once my account was dry I found out via the bank (+associated bank charges on top, of course)

I'm confused. Your original post says you received a $500 surprise bill but this comment implies they were billing and withdrawing funds monthly from your bank account. Which was it?

It was a surprise because I was not monitoring the relevant account.

The funds were being withdrawn month-to-month.

(though a portion is outstanding)

Well, if AWS was drawing $15/mo for 4 years from your banking account, as far as they knew you were a happy paying customer. How would they know otherwise? Sounds like you got in a particularly unlucky situation, but I don't think most companies will react sympathetically to "Oops my monthly subscription during the past 4 years was entirely by mistake and I didn't notice that until now. Can you refund the 4 years' worth of money?"

IME companies of that scale generally eat consumer-level buyer's remorse as a cost of doing business. Happily, probably not, but not enough to be worth resisting.

It's not really buyer's remorse if I didn't actually buy anything. I tried a free trial service, as far as I can remember just for an hour or so, and didn't need it.

You may not like this, but I'm posting my experience so that others can protect themselves. Do you at least see the utility in that?

Well the fact that I wasn't using any services, wasn't logging in, wasn't running anything except a default t2 instance is indicative.

But also there is IMO a reasonable expectation of a confirmation moving from free to paid service.

I get it sucks to be out the money, but in the end you accepted the terms and are responsible for the bill. I honestly feel you should be more upset with yourself (I would be if I was in your shoes) for not managing your accounts and money more closely and not upset with a company that you were consuming services from, even if you weren't meaning to. AWS owes you nothing in this scenario, IMO, I'd take it as a learning experience that at least wasn't more expensive.

I do think your telling other people to be careful of the terms they might have blindly accepted is totally reasonable, but where I at least found your original post kinda off is you are not taking responsibility for your mistake and instead are blaming Amazon. Just my 2 cents.

"If you're really careful and watch them like a hawk, AWS won't steal from you"

- sure, but that's a low standard and I'd like to see it raised over time with new legislation.

They claim to have sent billing emails but I cannot find them.

I found out when my bank informed me that my account was overdrawn (it was an account I was no longer using, due to an international move)

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