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Comment by helsinkiandrew | Hacker News Reader

Nothing for me compares to the time I purchased 2 reserved EC2 instances for about $5K on my personal account rather than companies. I can still remember that sinking feeling as I realized what I'd done.

Amazon refunded the next day.

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It’s incredibly easy to spend a lot of money on the cloud, indeed. I remember using Google Cloud’s translate API on a bunch of documents — it took several hours for the bill to pop up at $1500. This was a hobby / personal project of mine, Google did not refund it, because of course I should have read the pricing more carefully.

This is the advantage with AWS, they _will_ refund mistakes. I've seen it happen twice, and both times were resolved quickly with a rep on the phone.

I've also once had an issue with my own personal account. Five minutes with a rep on the phone saved not my bank account, but my website and hosted services, because my credit card was cancelled and it would be another few months before I could get another.

Amazon as a company tends to side with the customer. Their whole mantra is that it's not worth chasing after x* amount of dollars. Now repeat offenses? No, you're not getting away with using their services for free. (You mention twice, but I imagine 4 or 5 times, and they're going to fault you without escalating the issue)

*within reason... you're not going to serve up an app all month long and skip out on a million dollar bill.

> Amazon as a company tends to side with the customer.

Completely agree. Google might be learning parts of this with GCP, but historically, customer-obsessed isn't in Google's DNA.

This is Google style.. zero customer service

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