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Comment by jeffparsons | Hacker News Reader

IANAL, but if this happened to me I would be gathering as many examples as I could of this having happened to other people. The angle being: Google knows this is a huge issue. Effectively, they know that they have (presumably accidentally) created a really dangerous trap for small players, and have chosen to do nothing about it.

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.

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The FTC is already investigating: https://www.ftc.gov/policy/advocacy-research/tech-at-ftc/202...

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.

I would love to see an example of this working.

I know that if it did work it would change the opportunity cost of forgiving debt in these cases dramatically

I honestly think it would be better if they didn't have the option to "forgive the debt" — at least without following up by eliminating the trap that created said debt.

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.

Well, the "trap" is the lack of hard limits which, if implemented, would enable some companies to blow up their businesses. Which arguably is a better outcome than people who can't afford it getting big bills. But it is a tradeoff even aside from the providers arguably collecting some money people didn't intend to give them.

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