Depends on various factors and of course the amount of money in question. I've had AWS approve a refund for a rather large sum a few years ago, but that took quite a bit of back and forth with them.

Crucial for the approval was that we had cost alerts already enabled before it happened and were able to show that this didn't help at all, because they triggered way too late. We also had to explain in detail what measures we implemented to ensure that such a situation doesn't happen again.

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pyrale 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Nothing says market power like being able to demand that your paying customers provide proof that they have solutions for the shortcomings of your platform.

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rwmj 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Wait, what measures you implemented? How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever?

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maccard 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

What does a hard cap look like for EBS volumes? Or S3? RDS?

Do you just delete when the limit is hit?

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__s 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's a system people opt into, you can do something like ingress/egress blocked, & user has to pay a service charge (like overdraft) before access opened up again. If account is locked in overdraft state for over X amount of days then yes, delete data

	▲	maccard 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can see the "AWS is holding me ransom" posts on the front page of HN already.

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timando 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

2 caps: 1 for things that are charged for existing (e.g. S3 storage, RDS, EBS, EC2 instances) and 1 for things that are charged when you use them (e.g. bandwidth, lambda, S3 requests). Fail to create new things (e.g. S3 uploads) when the first cap is met.

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wat10000 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A cap is much less important for fixed costs. Block transfers, block the ability to add any new data, but keep all existing data.

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umanwizard 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, delete things in reverse order of their creation time until the cap is satisfied (the cap should be a rate, not a total)

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maccard 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I would put $100 that within 6 months of that, we'll get a post on here saying that their startup is gone under because AWS deleted their account because they didn't pay their bill and didn't realise their data would be deleted.

> (the cap should be a rate, not a total)

this is _way_ more complicated than there being a single cap.

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umanwizard 7 hours ago | parent [-]

> I would put $100 that within 6 months of that, we'll get a post on here saying that their startup is gone under because AWS deleted their account because they didn't pay their bill and didn't realise their data would be deleted.

The cap can be opt-in.

	▲	maccard 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> The cap can be opt-in. People will opt into this cap, and then still be surprised when their site gets shut down.

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monerozcash 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>How about AWS implements a hard cap, like everyone has been asking for forever?

s/everyone has/a bunch of very small customers have/

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Dunedan 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The measures were related to the specific cause of the unintended charges, not to never incur any unintended charges again. I agree AWS needs to provide better tooling to enable its customers to avoid such situations.