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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

They can still theoretically send your bills to collections and ruin your credit

Why can't we bill them for wasted time and stolen money, send those bills to collection and ruin their credit? Something seems unfair about the power dynamic.

Well, you can document your attempts to close the account and report it to the police. It's just a lot of work and you will only gain a document you can use to press your credit card issuer into rejecting the payments.

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.

Or take you to court.

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.

Another reason that I'm very hesitant to run anything on Amazon.

I'm completely amazed that such a large group of developers have decided to put their personal credit card on Amazon. Foolish choices lead to bad outcomes.

When does billing by the hour for storage/everything start to seem appealing?

I wanted to use ECS/Fargate earlier this year and the deploy kept failing. It was an issue on my end, but the infuriating thing was that Cloudwatch didn't have any logs 80% of the time. Like, at random: I could click the redeploy button 5 times and 4 of those times wouldn't have logs while one would. Of course, they charged me per deploy. I ended up running up a bill of $100 before I said screw it and used DigitalOcean instead (where I had logs consistently and was able to debug my container deploy within about 10 minutes and only a few cents of a bill).

I had a similar issue when moving our stack to ECS Fargate. logs wouldn’t tell us anything other than ‘application was terminated’ within seconds of it booting. The most helpful thing was looking at the reason given for the container shutting down(which still was a difficult riddle for a Fargate noob).

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.

Yeah, my issue was something similar. When I moved it to DigitalOcean, I was getting logs consistently (from my application) and I traced it to something that was misconfigured on my end, which was causing health checks to fail. It took a total of about 10 minutes to track and fix on DO, while I had already spent 2 days (and the $100) trying to figure it out on AWS.

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).

There's nothing particular about Amazon here, any company or person you owe money to in the US (can't speak for other countries) can take you to court or turn your debt over to a collection agency.

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?

And you use the Fair Credit Reporting Act to force them to validate the debt or cease collection activity. For small amounts they will not go through legal hoops.

Unless you provided a social security number to AWS at signup, going to be a pain for them to ruin your credit.

It's not hard to get a SSN from a name + address

Legally?

Often yes. And perhaps more importantly: you don't need a SSN to send a debt to collections or report it to a credit bureau (though of course it helps).

Legally shmegally. Just download one of the many troves of hacked databases. I'm sure you'll find the data you need somewhere. Or hire a 3rd party that does stuff on your behalf. Now you have plausible deniability in that you're the one not doing it.

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