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Comment by romeros | Hacker News Reader

This is just a single data point but I had a surprise bill with Google. I talked to the support and got it waived off.

I used Amazon EC2 instances for years and I always felt in control. There were never any surprises. I knew even in the worst case situation I would be okay because I had faith in the Amazon support. With Google I felt insecure. I never played with any of Google cloud services since then.

Amazon's customer first policy is really true. They try their absolute best to make sure there are no surprises to a great extent. Even the UI is very intuitive.

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Same here - incidentally was also one of the weirdest interactions with customer support I've ever had. I suspect the first point of contact was some sort of LLM/chatbot that desperately wanted to make sure I was feeling fine and that there was nothing to worry about. When I was forwarded to the billing support team the interaction went back to normal - couple of messages back and forth and some homework to set the real budget limit (the quota is just for alarms) and they waved the charge.

>Amazon's customer first policy is really true.

Which part of customer first drove their egress fee policies?

The part that was ALWAYS there.

Egress is basically all outbound traffic. The fee was always this. Dont act shocked when it doesn't go down when you have buyers remorse.

Same here. GCP waived off a surprise bill of $4,500 when I accidentally left a TPUv1 running for a month many years ago on a personal project (I was just toying around with the new TPU for an hour or so in my own free time, and didn't realize that unlike a GPU, the TPU has to be shut off separately from the CPU/VM or else it keeps charging by the hour.

Amazon definitely also has it's share of billing issues.

A personal example would be that we reserved an instance based on information given by our AWS account manager. Said instance turned out to have issues linked to my original question to the account manager who answered incorrectly.

The reserved instance team then refused to refund us but also refused to tell how much they would prorate if we were to upgrade instead.

Basically a protection racket.

I simply don’t accept this argument, primarily because the way AWS handles NAT gateway fees is really only explainable as something that is designed to be predatory

Yeah, I have spent much more than $14k to date and would have spent much more over time, losing my business isn't rational. I think it's just another "Google can't do customer support to literally save their life" example.

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