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Comment by safog | Hacker News Reader

Early days of EC2 were chock full of stories like this - Of kids / engineers running up their CC bill because they screwed up in some way they didn't anticipate and Amazon CS would bail them out.

I don't think this was a cynical marketing ploy designed from the top down either, it was a very natural thing for the company to be customer obsessed and trying to do right by them.

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At the request of an EC2 support staff, I left some machines running to help them debug an issue where machines became unreachable within minutes of being created. I was erroneously charged for this. Throughout the years Amazon has variously said that they could not refund me because they had no records from this time period or offered me AWS credits. I expect to the situation to never be resolved.

> I don't think this was a cynical marketing ploy designed from the top down either, it was a very natural thing for the company to be customer obsessed and trying to do right by them.

It's trying to do right by the legal and finance departments, not by the customers. Going after someone for anything less than a mid to high five figure AWS bill is never worth it because the legal costs are astronomical, the defendant probably can't pay in the end, and the cost of defending will drain the customer of any more resources that could have been spent on the cloud.

It's the cost of doing business. The choice is between trying to bleed a rock or a safe bet that LTV will be higher than the marginal cost.

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