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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

I don't get why AWS refunded him, it was purely his mistake.

It's good customer service and leads to more profit in the long-run.

If they didn't refund him, maybe he'd jump to a different provider, maybe people would see this and not sign up for AWS in the first place, etc. By refunding him, they likely keep a customer, don't scare away other potential customers, etc.

It's a quite small sum in AWS terms, loosing a customer could easily cost them more in future revenue. And especially for bandwidth I'd assume their actual cost is way below the billed cost, so refunding it is cheap.

Making a big deal out of this on Twitter may have something to do with it.

I loathe the day when I'll have a similar problem but, as I am not a Twitter user, I won't have the luxury of getting my problems fixed.

AWS is actually one of the few organizations I’ve dealt with where the CSRs seem to be empowered to do stuff like this without you having to raise a storm on social media first.

In my anecdotal experience, just submitting a support ticket explaining what got screwed up and you made a mistake and how you’re going to rectify it so it doesn’t happen again is usually enough to get the charges refunded. And even if you don’t submit all that, often they’ll just prompt you for it.

For example, when a legacy account got compromised and rang up like $20k in charges running a bunch of servers to mine some sort of crypto, we asked for a (totally undeserved) refund and they just had us rotate all our access keys and refunded it.

The support is part of the reason why I prefer dealing with AWS. I know from my time managing over a million bucks a year in AdWords spend that the reason Google’s support is non-existent isn’t because you’re not a paying customer...

Because AWS honestly cares more about having a happy loyal customer for the long term than making a few bucks in the short term. That’s why. It’s a rare mindset among large companies these days.

There was apparently also a bug that caused partial http requests to be counted as complete file downloads.

The bandwidth probably costs them $2

Exactly. It’s amazing how good customer service can be when the profit margins are high enough. It’s really only dumb companies and those with too much power that tend to combine high margins with bad customer service.

It's a bit skipped over but there seems to have been a bug somewhere between Cloudflare and AWS which further increased the problem.

So they just waived it as it's better press.

Through I'm surprised they waved all of it, I would have expected half or so to be waved but then it doesn't really matter for them.

It seems to be pretty common not just for Amazon to be nice in case of such mesup's so that it is less likely to scare away people.

He made it to the HN front page. (Maybe after the refund, but still I guess he has some track record, blog, twitter, knowing people at AWS, whatever.) I seriously doubt whether AWS would refund everybody else making stupid mistakes. If they did they would advertise it as "no billing surprises".

"A quarter-million people saw the tweet and a third of them interacted with it."

Marketing: https://www.yourtrainingedge.com/the-29-costly-implications-...

I posted elsewhere in the thread answering my theory.

TL;DR Individual feels wronged, pushes things off AWS at their employer, AWS loses much more than $3k refund.

Especially given that the 3k probably cost them much much less and it's probably also tax deductible...

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