I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to.
Amazon can keep trying to get blood from a stone...
Amazon can keep trying to get blood from a stone...
Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience. That's definitely not the culture that I'm experiencing every day or that we hold ourselves to. Our goal is to deliver a ton of value to customers. If we are not delivering value then it would not be in line with how we operate to want to charge you for that.
Out of curiosity, did you try contacting AWS support? Almost all customers I speak to love our support and the fact they can speak to an actual human. Of course I can't speak to the actual case as I'm just providing my personal opinion here, but I would not be surprised if support could fix this for you quickly and zero out any small balances that you accrued because you weren't able to access/use your account.
Spending more to provide better customer service (explicitly or implicitly through bugfixes) is not generally how this type of need is. Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.
Support will routinely give forgive an account balance given a good enough reason.
> I've had to ask my credit card company to block AWS charging an account that I can't remember the login to.
We don't know whether OP has reached out to AWS support, but one can assume so since AWS is charging an account the user cannot log in to.
Further, it sounds like the user has found their own resolution, so the user isn't asking for _help_ on HN, more that they are registering poor experience in agreement with others. So, it is a rough UX edge.
> Folks shouldn't need to post their grievances to a very public site to be heard, and that it needs to happen to get traction on an issue should be taken as a clear gap in customer service provision.
Yet by your very own comment you say that we don't know if he actually tried to contact support so there is no "clear gap in customer service provision".
The fact is, anyone who actually interacted with an AWS rep would tell you that they would delete the bucket and not charge you for it.
This is both on retail side and AWS side.
My only request - do some more automated discovery and remediation tooling for VPC-classic accounts! It's annoying to figure out what needs to be handled there - give me a dashboard for this.
I've been paying $10/month for over a year on an EC2 (I think?) instance I spun up, and I still haven't had the time to go in and find it and delete it. I've tried several times (and even disputed the credit card charge one month).
I'll probably just end up cancelling this credit card. That would be a lot easier than figuring out how to stop AWS from charging me.
Nooooo no no no that is not true. If you cancel, this debt will follow you on your credit history and via collectors. Canceling a CC does not waive you of responsibility.
Just contact AWS support. Tell them your story. They’ll get your account closed and they’ll probably forgive whatever outstanding bill you have.
Please don’t just run away from the bill, you’re just setting yourself up for pain later.
At this point, they're legally committing fraud. I don't see how closing a credit card that has regular fraudulent transactions is wrong, or likely to cause problems later on.
If some random wants to contact amazon to delete our business AWS account they need to reject that as well.
I would login, open a account and billing support case.
Do Account / Close and cancel my account
They will give you a chat or call back option in most cases. The call back option has worked well for me.
If I write an email to them asking them to cancel an account, doesn't that constitute legal termination of my authorization to continue service or charge me?
Unless the service agreement I signed specifies a specific way to cancel an account - in that case my agreement to it constitutes authorization unless I jump through their hoops. Argh.
Remember, canceling your account means everything (EVERYTHING) is deleted. They are far far more concerned that someone will randomly email them pretending to be the CTO of some startup or you, and they will blow away 3 years of someone's work.
Canceling your account even cancels glacier, WORM records, object and compliance lock data etc.
Everything I've seen says that AWS rightfully biases towards retention unless the delete request is very clear - and email will never rise to that level (nor should it!).
So you have to login and close your account yourself.
How you get from a very reasonable business practice here (and they are frankly one of the easiest of the major players to actually talk to) to fraud... is a stretch.
Edit: For those not familiar with AWS account closure here are the steps:
https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/close...
> They are absolutely not commiting fraud - that is a total lie.
Lie isn't the word you're looking for when you disagree with someone.
If they never respond they aren't engaging with the OP to figure out what this person want's. If the OP even contested the charges AWS has been warned that someone isn't happy with the contract. Both by personal email and by the credit card company.
That should give you a breakdown of where the charges are coming from, specifically which region an EC2 instance might be running in. Once you can figure out which region it's in, you can go to the EC2 dashboard for that region [2] and start terminating instances.
Having said this, AWS should seriously have a way to say "close this account and delete/stop everything associated with it." Having to spelunk through bills and the AWS console to figure out what you're getting charged for is a joke.
[1]: https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?#/bills?year=202...
[2]: https://us-west-2.console.aws.amazon.com/ec2/v2/home?region=...: (update both us-west-2 with whatever region you're looking for)
Theoretically. I don't know in what cases Amazon might do either of these things. If you're not in the US, that's certainly another layer of barrier.
But yes, in the US anyway, whether you legally owe someone money or not and they can legally collect on it is not controlled by whether you've cancelled a credit card.
When does billing by the hour for storage/everything start to seem appealing?
In our case, it was a message saying something like ‘container timed out’ originally making us think it was a network issue. We ended up tracing it back to our app sometimes taking 21-30 seconds to fully boot, instead of the 20 second limit Fargate had for health checks. So even though the container did end up booting, Fargate was already waiting for it to start so it could kill it.
I mean, the issue was my fault, but AWS made it incredibly painful to figure out and fix and was not helpful at all. I decided that day that I will never use AWS again, unless I have someone with a lot of AWS experience on the team (and even then, only if I have a good reason to use AWS, in my case there is a reason why AWS would perhaps be desirable in the future but not enough to go through the pain again myself).
I haven't heard of Amazon specifically ever doing either of these things.
Or am I missing what you're saying is particular to Amazon and relevant here?
Also, if they do send your debit to collectors, you can go to a court and ask for the debit to be dropped and for them to pay damages. That is a lot more work, but if they are clearly on the wrong will get you something.