Hacker News Reader

Comment by geertj | Hacker News Reader

PM at AWS, writing on my own personal behalf.

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.

View on HN

With all due respect, it has nothing to do with culture and more to do with business processes having rough edges. At AWS' scale, any rough edge is more than a rare edge case, since rarity flies out the window.

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.

That's kind of his point though, OP did not need to post to HN, he can just contact AWS Support and get the bucket deleted at (probably) no charge.

Support will routinely give forgive an account balance given a good enough reason.

From the comment:

> 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.

You wrote:

> 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.

From my own experience, no you can't. All links to cknta t support require you to have an active AWS account. That defeats the purpose. YMMV as in maybe it's different today but that was my experience. And I was just trying to them to stop sending me spam after I had closed out my account.

It's weird to see hackers here posting this as AWS is literally the only web scale company I can actually talk to a person at to resolve rough edges.

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'd really be curious how much money AWS makes on zero-usage accounts where someone spun up something and then forgot how to log in or delete it.

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.

> 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.

I've actually contacted them via email multiple times, and they never respond.

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.

They are absolutely not commiting fraud - that is a total lie.

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.

> I've actually contacted them via email multiple times, and they never respond.

> 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.

> They are absolutely not commiting fraud - that is a total lie.

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.

No, it's in your agreement.

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...

I'd login and go look at your most recent bill, this should bring up the bill from September 2021, for you [1].

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)

Thanks! This is really helpful. Looks like it was a WorkSpace I spun up... I have no idea why I did that.

How hard is it to stop an EC2 instance? It's literally 3 or 4 clicks from when you login. As for forgetting how to login, if I give some company my credit card info, I damn well make sure I know how to login when I need to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com