Yup, I'm already having to pay legal fees - which is why you have a biz lawyer on retainer to start with - but I'm not sure I have any standing.
In some jurisdictions I think that reduces the legitimacy of their claim that you actually owe them money.
EDIT: Even better, focus on the examples where Google "forgave" the debt; you could argue that those examples prove that Google knows it's at least partly their fault.
I know that if it did work it would change the opportunity cost of forgiving debt in these cases dramatically
How often is one of these accidental debts created? How often do customers just pay up because it's small enough that it's not worth fighting? How often does AWS (or Google or whoever) decide whether to forgive the debt based on PR damage control rather than the legitimacy of the debt? Jeez I hope someone leaks those numbers one day.
It reminds me of all those horror stories of hospital visits in the USA, where the first bill you receive is just a test to see if they can squeeze that much out of you, but if you know what you're doing or just can't pay then the actual bill is way lower. It's all just yucky.
If big cloud providers couldn't selectively choose which of these debts to enforce, I bet there would be a media shitstorm and then they would suddenly discover that it's not all thaaaaat hard to implement real time billing and hard caps after all.
I think we (the developer community) need to start pushing back against this abuse, it's getting out of control.
The thing that bothers me the most is I caught this $14k charge b/c I'm a small fry and that money matters to me. How many big accounts just wouldn't notice that? I can't help but think a very non-trivial % of all cloud revenue is just obscure fees that nobody notices - engineers doing the engineering, accounts receivable pays the bills, and the cloud providers get fat.