Maybe it teaches some of them not to stick their hand in lawnmowers.
When I was a student, I had an account at Citizens Bank, which had a branch on-campus. I pretty much never used it: I put some money in at the beginning, occasionally added some; used the ATM from time to time.
At the end of four years, I decided to close my account. There was less money in there than I thought there should be. I demanded an accounting. They happily demonstrated that there was a disclosed-only-in-fine-print fee charged each month that I didn't use the account according to some arcane formula. They wouldn't refund the fee.
So for the thirty or forty years since, I've never used Citizens Bank for anything, even if it would have been convenient. And I discouraged other people from doing so. I imagine I've cost them several thousand times those fees in revenue over the years.
Anyway, this is a story about AWS and their no-good, horrible-by-design billing practices.
At the end of the year of travel, I went into the branch to close the account and they said I couldn't close it because I couldn't withdraw the remaining $2.11 because it was lower than the minimum withdrawal amount (I think maybe $10) and that I should just leave it open.
About a year later, I got the latest 6 month statement that they'd posted internationally saying that my account was now $100 ish overdrawn, because they'd started charging me a monthly fee on the account, and somehow I was just expected to have known that. The previous statement hadn't mentioned it, they'd just started charging it because they'd introduced a fee for accounts with a low balance. It took about several long international phone calls (and back then they were about $0.40 per minute, at least one was probably an hour long) to convince them that I had no plans to return to Australia in the foreseeable future, or to pay them the account fee especially given that I had attempted to close the account previously and they refused, and finally they agreed to close the account and waive the fee. But I'd spent loads in charges on the international calls, and they'd posted me a statement twice printed on heavy non-airmail paper, all because they wouldn't just let me shut my account when I originally asked in branch to do it.
25 years later and I still haven't gone back to Australia, even though it was one of the best years of my life. I'm going blame the bank for that (even though it was really just not having the opportunity to go again!)
Sorry you had to go through that clusterf*.
I've cost them tens of thousands of dollars because they couldn't do the decent thing and apologize.
Or it's a UX gap. If this is such a common complaint that's causing meaningful reputation damage, surely there'd be a better way to communicate this in the product? I think it's fair to assume that there's less interest in building features that encourage users to spend less money.
You have to go into third party tooling if you want any chance of seeing what’s actually going on, especially if there’s any odds of you deploying stuff in another region and even moreso if you have more than 1 account.
At this point, I’d say it should be a best practice of owning 2 AWS accounts, even as a hobbyist: one payer account with a HEAVILY locked down SCP and then a child account with the stuff you’re deploying.
It's no accident, it's not just "bad UX", it's deliberate.
> AWS doesn’t charge you in mysterious ways. It charges you in specific, predictable ways that nobody taught you to look for. That’s a knowledge gap.
Observe the mental gymnastics to explain away "mysterious ways" by making it the users fault and calling them - *checks notes* - stupid, for not knowing something AWS is very intentionally keen on you not knowing.
I sure hope OP was getting payed for this AWS ad, imagine shilling for a multi-billion dollar company for free.
Old you was right. No student should ever enter personal payment information into AWS. You cannot afford the mistake.
They have chosen not to make a safe way to use it without financial risks.
I'm surprised they don’t just waive low balances, like many banks do [0]
How is it economical for AWS to charge a credit card for a penny? I wonder what Amazon’s agreements with interchange networks must be like...
[0]: https://www.doctorofcredit.com/small-balance-waiver-a-k-a-lo...
Same here! Am I being charged a fractional cent rounded down to 0? Who knows!?
> [Snapshots] get created automatically, often during deletion workflows, and nobody thinks to look for them.
creating random backups of things you are shutting down "just in case" that you must then remember to go back and delete. It's especially annoying if you stood up an EC2 instance or whatever, realized you messed up the configuration and immediately shut it down. Now you have a pile of poop running up your bill that you need to find and delete.
For the uninitiated, both of them require you to make a new account, because apparently billion dollar corporations think a system that uses your email address as an immutable foreign key constraint is just fine.
Cursor won't let you bill out the outstanding API amount until the end of your subscription period, so you can cancel the account but it sits there able to be logged into and reactivated until your billing completes at the end of the billing interval. Getting a response to any sort of attempts to sort this out is pretty much yelling into the void. Really, your choice is to cancel the card if you get your email hacked.
At least Anthropic gets back to you and shuts it down manually, and I was even refunded my months subscription fees even though I didn't ask for it. But still a stupid, stupid way to change an email address.
