Smallish company here - we have a premium support plan that over the years has cost us like 6k per support issue, all three times because of bugs on their end.
Edit: We feel that we need it in case anything really gets messed up - like some complex account hijack or similar. Does this make sense? Are we overpaying for no reason?
We're a small US based company, just a few people. They required verification documents, business registration all a real headache. After all of that we couldn't use a single thing to run, not even cloud shell. It's as if the account was disabled in some very obscure way. We spent 2 weeks arguing with support to please reinstate access to our account, and after 4 false "it should work now" responses they told us to start paying for premium support.
PAY PREMIUM TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR A SERVICE THAT WE NEVER GOT ACCESS TO OR USE.
Was it because you were doing "AWS activate" or something? If that experience is much worse than their regular signup process that's both funny and sad :/
With AWS support what I do is enable "developer support" (~$30/month) when I need to ask them a bunch of stuff, then I cancel it for the other 11 months of the year when I don't need their help. It's a bit cheap and I'm sure my account rep would have words if I was a "real business" but in practice it works for me.
It's not like that was my first time working with AWS, it was my first time with my company though. It was weird for everyone.
It works the same for most companies where their product is a foundation of your business.
Think Apple store for instance: you'll pay for premium support tickets to have expedited reviews of your apps, even if it's to work around a bug they just pushed in their new OS update.
One "hack" I've recommended for larger enterprises is to budget a minuscule amount for their pro-services, but only to rely upon AWS "Principal or Product" engineers. I've been involved in far too many "Pro Services Remediation" engagements.