Ask HN: Insane Azure Charges?

Microsoft intends to charge me for an Azure VM instance as if it ran for more than a week even though I shut it down in the OS and also stopped it on the management dashboard within the first three hours, racking up a heart-stopping £5000+ charge by the next time I checked. (Only deleting it stopped the charges accumulating. FWIW Google charges only for storage on stopped instances.) Does this happen to everyone? Microsoft has offered to reduce the amount by about eighty percent but I still feel like I've been tricked into spending much more than I intended on a personal hobby project. Am I being ungrateful when I have only myself to blame or is it time to lawyer up?