
AWS charged me $500 over 4 years for a “free” micro instance - rmtech
AWS &quot;free&quot; offerings can cost a lot more than you think - I tried out a &quot;free&quot; t2.micro instance in 2016 and received a surprise bill for $500 recently.<p>It turns out that AWS does not terminate unused free instances when the 12 month free trial runs out - they will happily bill you until the end of time, irrespective if you ever log in to their service, run code, etc.<p>When I got in touch with AWS customer services about this they just told me to get lost.<p>Legally AWS may be skirting around consumer protection regulations with the way they market AWS free as free credits rather than a free service.<p>There are laws like 15 USC Ch. 110: ONLINE SHOPPER PROTECTION §8403. &quot;Negative option marketing on the Internet&quot; which are designed to prevent companies from automatically and silently upgrading customers from a free trial to a paid product.<p>Companies like Amazon will keep doing this for as long as we let them get away with it - do what you can to protect yourself from outrageous costs; use a prepaid credit card with a limited balance when signing up online, and spread the word about AWS&#x27; bad behavior.
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elmerfud
While I don't like the business practice, it is a very common business
practice to give something for free for a time and then bill you if you don't
cancel it. There is nothing illegal about it as it's all spelled out in the
terms and conditions you didn't read.

I avoid engaging in these offers entirely. If a company tells me it's free
then fine but I won't be providing a credit card number or any other billing
related information. It's not free if you ask to hold on to my money is just a
scam so you can bill me later.

I deal with this with Delta's Clear program. They say it's free for diamond
medallion status, but they always want my credit card. That's not free then.
That's just you're not charging me now and hoping I forget later.

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mtmail
The credit card rules converting the free trials to paid got a bit more strict
recently, e.g. notifying the users before it starts
[https://blog.recurly.com/visas-new-free-trial-mandate-
what-y...](https://blog.recurly.com/visas-new-free-trial-mandate-what-you-
need-to-know)

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mtmail
AWS went from no invoice, no billing email for 3 years to a single $500
invoice covering multiple years? No previous contact? At 0.0116 USD/h that's
about 720 days, I'm surprised they wouldn't invoice sooner.

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davismwfl
Something is either missing or just isn't accurate in the OPs description. The
likelihood of this happening is extremely remote at best but frankly IMO
highly improbable period. I honestly don't believe this happened as described,
but that isn't to say surprise bills don't exist on all the cloud providers.
So I could see maybe the OP got a $500 bill unexpectedly, but most likely
because someone found/stole an old account credential out of a public git
repository (or similar) and the OP just didn't realize/know it. That makes a
ton more sense and I have seen it happen quite a few times, it is an honest
but costly mistake. If that is the case though, usually AWS is wiling to work
with you if you just talk to them and are honest. So I am not saying the OP
didn't necessarily get a surprise bill but maybe he/she is misunderstanding
what happened or is just anti-AWS for whatever reason and is trying to make
some point.

I have been using AWS almost since the public release and I have had a few
clients who hit hard times and didn't pay their AWS invoice timely over the
years, a few more clients where things went from free to need to pay and they
didn't. Each of them had services terminated after 30 to 60 days max, usually
a smaller dollar amount AWS will let go for ~2 months but you will have
received numerous emails from them first before they will terminate the
account. Also, if you contact AWS and ask for a payment extension they are
also usually pretty decent about it, but no, they wouldn't allow an unpaid
instance to run for years. If by some chance this happened (highly doubt it)
it could be a software error on AWS's side and raising it to AWS would likely
result in them forgiving the bill and fixing the issue because they don't want
to miss out of revenue either.

My last soap box point, AWS is very clear you are responsible for the
instance/service termination to avoid charges, so is Azure and GCP for that
matter. They all are clear on how it works, you are responsible for reading
the information and complying with the rules. IME all the cloud provides give
you some latitude on payments though because if they were too aggressive with
account suspensions/terminations they could get smacked for that as well,
possibly even sued over lost revenue etc, so they have significant
warnings/out reach which document their attempts too contact you and resolve
it before they terminate to avoid that scenario.

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rmtech
No, it definitely wasn't a stolen credential. It's just ~$15/month for 4-5
years, which I didn't notice due to changing banks and an international move.

Once my account was dry I found out via the bank (+associated bank charges on
top, of course)

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yongjik
Well, if AWS was drawing $15/mo for 4 years from your banking account, as far
as they knew you were a happy paying customer. How would they know otherwise?
Sounds like you got in a particularly unlucky situation, but I don't think
most companies will react sympathetically to "Oops my monthly subscription
during the past 4 years was entirely by mistake and I didn't notice that until
now. Can you refund the 4 years' worth of money?"

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naniwaduni
IME companies of that scale generally eat consumer-level buyer's remorse as a
cost of doing business. Happily, probably not, but not enough to be worth
resisting.

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rmtech
It's not really buyer's remorse if I didn't actually buy anything. I tried a
_free_ trial service, as far as I can remember just for an hour or so, and
didn't need it.

You may not like this, but I'm posting my experience so that others can
protect themselves. Do you at least see the utility in that?

