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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

I just reserved a series of heavy-utilization m3.xlarge instances for roughly $30k. Apparently, if I had waited a month, I could have saved about $13k because of these price reductions.

I can't help but feel that I got really fucked by poor timing that I couldn't control. It would hurt so much less if these price changes were more gradual and somewhat consistent (perhaps monthly).

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It's worth calling and talking to your sales rep about this. I've found AWS to be surprisingly accommodating with pricing.

Ditto. At the AWS keynote today Andy Jassy, Senior Vice President, spoke of cost saving initiatives AWS has going with $200m already saved via automated notifications to customers to power down their inactive EC2 instances. Andy emphasized the importance of great customer service by AWS & helping customers cut costs. Use that as your leverage point in the discussions with your sales rep. Hope it works out for you!

I accidentally ran a spot instance for $70 an hour for two hours due to my less-then-smart configuration. They refunded me.

That says a lot for their customer service. I know a lot of companies that would have had more of a "you break it, you buy it" style attitude. Good on them!

Me too, I accidentally ran some windows instances for like a month!

They want your business for the long term, not just to turn a quick buck.

Shouldn’t such cases be detected automatically? It would really help Amazon’s brand of being shroud.

Well, I bought a 3-year reserved heavy utilization plan just a couple of hours before these news went live. My pain is about 2 orders of magnitude less than yours, though. I wonder if you can contact someone at Amazon and ask for some kind of discount.

Anyway, what a massive drop in price and what a swift reaction from Amazon. Competition can really do wonders. I just hope we won't be seeing drops in the level of service.

Knowing amazons customer service, I would be floored if they would refund you the difference. A couple weeks/days? Maybe maybe not, depends on which rep you get honestly. But a couple hours? That would just be cruel for them not to.

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