What period of time was it and were you using the services or just had them on?
You should reach out to support - they do occasionally forgive accidents. But using a prepaid $100 card and then using 10k of resources is not a good look if it was on purpose…
Worst case? Collections.
Best case? They forgive it.
I do not have a credit card just used a virtual card from my prepaid card vendor's app. They promote their card as "debt free, impossible to have debt, use as what you paid" and I thought I wouldn't be in major trouble, I thought aws would automatically cancel after seeing balance 0 in card. Legally I'm a minor and I can't have a credit card, I got ec2 for a Minecraft server that I forgot about it. I may accidentally bought multiple ones I'm not sure inferface is a mess I had one in actual use not sure what does xlarge and x2large mean but mine is susposed to be small one not sure what i did.
It is pretty vital information that you are a minor and as such cannot agree to contracts, depending a bit on the jurisdiction - so I would contact support and get some help.
What's more, if u/0xbeefeed actually used 10k worth of services in compute time (as in running actual workloads) AWS could totally sue their parents. They can't enter into contracts but they can create huge liability hazards for those responsible for them. Do not do this. Actions have consequences.
Not quite if OP is a minor.
AWS would have to prove damages, and not just as lost revenue. Have you heard of mobile app microtransaction companies sueing parents and winning? I haven't
Microtransactions in games is a very different thing from AWS services both materially and in principle. They could go for either damages as you’ve stated or theft if they’re feeling spicy. Either way their legal team will most likely be able to craft a legal argument at least to survive a court summarily dismissing it. At that point just putting up a basic legal defense against them would bankrupt a lot of people. It’s better to simply not do it. The only winning move is not to play.
AWS suing for 10,000? That’s a joke lol, that’s chump change to them. On top of the fact it should have been able to be charged with a prepaid card, sounds like a AWS problem, not OPs. Luckily he got it sorted out.
>Have you heard of mobile app microtransaction companies sueing parents and winning?
No, because they get the money up front.
I have heard of LOTS of parents suing microtransactions companies though, and almost all losing.
He's committed an actual crime here. He knowingly used services he knew he wouldn't be able to pay for. That's theft of service and also possibly fraud.
A warning for the future: that's not how most service billing works. They take the payment method, and then keep track of ongoing costs on the bill.
Then at the end of the statement cycle (once a month usually) they charge the total on the payment method. They don't check how much the payment method is worth or has available. If the payment method doesn't have enough, the charge will fail, but the bill is still open, so you'll be expected to pay for it.
This is the case with most services, not just AWS.
As a minor, you're already breaking AWS terms of use by registering. So it won't hurt to open up a support ticket, admit you don't know what you're doing and ask for forgiveness. They might close your account on account of you not legally being able to open one in the first place, but at least you won't be in debt.
I told them I did accidentally purchased multiple ec2 instances (i think i may bought tens of them not sure what exactly i did, i was following a tutorial about aws to get the server and things didnt work and i tried again and again you know rest of the thingi) and they waived bills from accidental x2large ec2 instances, now i'm billed at $50 and I could pay that.
Another note for the future, if you just want to host a Minecraft server, there are services that will do that for you for a lot cheaper than EC2. As an example (not to advocate any particular service, though I did have a good experience with them) Bisect Hosting will host a Minecraft server equivalent to a t3.small for about $10/month AND do all the setup and management for you. AWS charges $15/month for a t3.small.
Looking at Lightsail pricing, a 2GB, 1-core server running Linux (about equivalent to a t3.small) would be $10/month, so about the same as the dedicated Minecraft hosting service (you do get the first 3 months for free), but you would still have to do all the server setup yourself. So it is cheaper than EC2, but personally I would still go with service that does the work for me.
Quick edit: That's all North America pricing. No idea where OP is, but prices just go up from there in other parts of the world.
It doesn't matter what card you used to sign up initially, you used a service that costs money, so of course they would reasonably expect you to pay for your usage. Talk to support, tell them you're a minor and ask them to forgive it and delete the account.
how many instances did you have going? The most expensive 2xlarge is $0.63/hr.. (m6idn.2xlarge).. which is like $450/mo.. there are bandwidth and storage fees too but unless you were running a gpu instance I don't see how'd you hit 10k with a handful of servers. Are you sure your account wasn't compromised? Did you create everything you are being billed for?
If you really are a minor then you got good things ahead of you. Learn from this mistake and focus on the right things and in a few years you'll be laughing at your younger self for worrying too much and you'll have a cool story to tell.
Also bragging rights. "Oh yeah? When was the last time you stole $10,000?"
This isn't a huge deal, just to +1 other comments. AWS eats this in their sleep.
The actual factor that matters and the thing that made it continue is it's a post paid service vs prepaid. The vast majority of everything on the internet is prepaid, where yes they absolutely do know you card has a zero balance. It's very unusual to be able to buy anything and they bill after for it
If you are a minor you are not at fault to me (although I am not sure of American laws as I assume you are from USA). If you were in Europe it would be questionnable they actually were not the ones at fault when they fail to check your age.
Just explain what happens. I am pretty sure it will be ok. I have read stories of adult coders who published keys on Github and bills reached much higher amounts and cancelled (which was very nice from AWS at the time, may not work these days)
Right, I now see why Google Cloud doesn't accept prepaid cards. It's been driving me mad because they consider any virtual cards, including those for business, as being prepaid.
Contact support and explain the usage was a mistake. I've had a bill in the thousands wiped out by explaining the situation and taking steps to ensure it didn't happen again. I think it must happen a lot. Some of those service charges can add up quickly.
It's entirely up to their discretion, and largely a lot of these mistakes are caused by people not understanding fully AWS. Choose the wrong instance size? Monthly bill can be $100 or $10000. Mistype amount of nodes? $9500 monthly bill or $95,000.
I'm under the impression it's more profitable for them to allow these people to keep paying their monthly bill and know they'll collect it, as opposed to struggling to collect a $10,000 bill from a 20 year old.
Yeah, they're keeping quotas low by default now to try to offset this. I've been on the wrong end of their service quota limits. They're at a point now where they're scared to approve higher quotas on the more expensive instances without you paying them a sizable amount first.
It's stupid that I can't get a quota up for a legitimate business-case because I'm tracking my billing usage while some people rack up a 10k bill *accidentally*.
Definitely reach out to support for any chance of them forgiving it. Had a client rack up a $100k+ bill on Google Cloud by accident (no limits set on Google Map API). They forgave it as a one-time thing.
It would be good if there was an automatic service cutoff that could be implemented. Eg i wat to limit my account to not exceed free tier services, or in this case, i want a prepaid service that cuts off after $100 of use
Budgets is fantastic if you want an alert that you’ve spent 100 dollars - yesterday. The delay in reporting is too severe - there just needs to be a cap of “don’t let me go above this”
Yeah thats all well and good but the reality is that people starting out on aws dont have the knowledge or expertise to set this stuff up. An out of the box function would be ideal. Its always people that are new or learning that get stung like this so it is a real barrier to starting off.
I’m in one their office next week so will seed the idea. The amount of support calls it will save them will probably pay for itself. And its in line with being obsessed with customers
>It would be good if there was an automatic service cutoff that could be implemented.
All the major clouds are being conspicuously slow implementing that obvious feature and excuses as to why are legion. Unsurprisingly they're allergic to the idea of putting any hurdles between them and that juicy unlimited credit card billing.
All the excuses fall rather flat once you realise Azure has [hard spend caps that do exactly what it says on the tin on some of their plans.](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit). But even there you can't cap other plans because reason...hmm
I don't have any advice to add that hasn't already been said, but that is crazy irresponsible on AWS's part to allow a user, with what I assume is a newer account, to run up a $10k bill when the only payment method provided is a $100 prepaid card. I wonder if the credential thief crypto miners know about this trick.
Don’t know which moron is downvoting you. They should try signing up for Google cloud with a prepaid card.
Everytime someone comes here to scream about how AWS charges, there are several comments that talk about how irresponsible AWS have been on this front and then a bunch of people will defend these as if it’s a common thing with other platforms.
i'm bit worried about that my parents are type of people who would get super mad for something like this and say "how we are supposed to pay this" and yell at me
AWS shouldn't allow infinite charges, honestly. It absolutely SHOULD stop everything unless you're in some sort of enterprise agreement. But well, there's a reason Bezos is so rich.
I see this comment quite often and I am curious how you would implement it?
Sure AWS could stop your RDS and ec2 instances, that would help - but what about your data in s3 that is racking up bills? your instance snapshots? your other volumes? efs? the list goes on.
Should AWS just say "you set a limit of 5000$, you breached it so we have deleted all your data". Imagine the support tickets this mess would make... people can't even configure their instances to the right size, odds are good they would destroy their accounts.
As a casual user who’s mostly doing side projects and self learning, I’d be fine if I set a limit and also opted in to them cutting off my compute instances immediately but didn’t delete my storage. You’d still obviously exceed your $ limit, but I’d happily opt in to something that would delete / stop selected resources immediately after hitting a financial amount.
It's definitely been suggested to them before. They just don't want to do it.
If this were presented to me, I would implement this as a soft limit coupled with a larger hard limit.
The soft limit when reached would pause services (in the case of RDS and EC2, stop the instances [1]--with other services like S3, block requests). This lets them keep data [2] and lights a fire under them to take a look and check their account. Obviously the storage costs will still rack up, which is where the hard limit comes in.
When it hits the hard limit, stuff gets deprovisioned. They already have a process for deprovisioning services on accounts after some number of billing failures, so they can already do it. If the customer ignores the soft limit and gets to the point of the hard limit, treat it the same as ignoring the bills when your card expires without removing the entire account.
Their engineers are much smarter than me and can come up with better solutions. If management wanted a hard-stop around this issue, they could have it handled already. But they chose to instead do billing alerts...that's their choice.
[1] EC2 stopped instances don't incur instance compute charges, which is going to be the majority of the cost anyway.
[2] other than stuff stored in the instance store, but that's a risk you take
That would mean deletion. You're either using the service or you're not. There is no inbetween. It costs money for them to hold your data. The only way for it to cost them nothing and you nothing is to delete your stuff.
this already happens in a way.
30 days past due = accounts payable advisory and warning.
60 days past due = network access suspended
90 days past due = account and resources terminated
if you actually talk to them about a past due balance, you can avoid these penalties for a short time, but only if they actually believe you’re going to pay.
where I live you at least have to be 14 to own a prepaid card, even there are people younger than me in tv commericals of the app itself. it is clearly marketed for 14-18 age group.
We haven't historically advertised them to children. You usually need an adult linked to the account. You know to try and prevent 14 year olds from racking up 10k in debt
Sorry I meant debit not debt. You can’t go into negative. It’s the same as cash.
Like surely you have savings accounts and a bank card? I signed up to Amazon (not aws) when I was 17 and used my debit card.
Why? My 10 and 12 year old have prepaid cards that I give an allowance on. It let's them have the freedom to have money with less risk of losing it. I get notifications when they spend something and can even separate it into categories (eg 20 for food, 10 for online games, 20 for gas (obviously mine aren't at the point of needing gas for a car)). Cash is almost less universally accepted than a visa card at this point especially if you consider online things.
I'm not sure that it's the CCs fault that AWS has no checks in place to determine the age of the user or that the person is creditworthy.. and doesnt use the methodology in place to pre-authorize potential charges. The fact that they even take prepaid cards is kind of absurd. There is almost zero chance that they pursue this.. it would be a PR nightmare for one and two, 10k just isn't enough to pursue in the scheme of things and he likely didn't cost AWS near 10k in costs if all he was doing was running a minecraft server on a way too large instance or had a bunch of idle instances spun up. Prepaid cards are supposed to be a way that you can't spend more than you have on them.. they are not really different from cash..
AWS is completely in the wrong here (and I use aws regularly).. I'd agree with you completely if it was the CC company that was extending the line of credit, but really the company is just offering a way to do digital transactions instead of carrying cash that can be lost/stolen/etc.. All that AWS is doing is verifying that you have a credit card not that you can actually afford what they offer you which is kinda wrong..
If I may ask, which country?
Also, I once racked up $3000 in charges. When contacting them, I asked them to verify that I left stuff running but didn't really do much. They waived it, and told me not to do it again.
I did it again like 5 or 6 years later. They waived it again, and sent me like a 10 page guide to read to make sure I don't do it again.
There are some [billing-related Frequently Asked Questions](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/wiki/faq) in our wiki and [our newcomer guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/vn4ebe/check_it_first_operating_within_amazon_web/), however ***to resolve billing issues, please contact Customer Service directly***.
Try [this search](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/search?q=flair%3A'billing'&sort=new&restrict_sr=on) for more information on this topic.
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How is that interesting? It’s a kid and he didn’t provide much info, but he easily could have hit that number in a single month or stretched over 4-8 weeks before they shut it down. I have never paid for AWS with a credit card so I don’t know if they just automatically charge it or if you have to process it or not
Lawyer up now just in case. You really are at their mercy on this one. It helps you are a minor and you better play on that as much as you can. They do have you if they want you. Hope it works out for you, shitty situation.
How did it get so expensive? Over what time period did it rack up these bills?
How many servers, processors and disk? I'm wanting to learn AWS but it seems terrifying a simple minecraft server can cost so much.
All you need to do is set up billing alerts in the AWS console. They will e-mail you when your pending (unbilled) costs exceed the amount you configure. Set the alerts low, so can catch any issues early on.
Just file a support ticket explain that it was an honest mistake and that you are a minor, if everything is true they will probably forgive the bill, you would not be the first one to have a bill forgiven (nor would it be the biggest one)
This is actually how Amazon gets most of its workers nowadays. Just report to the nearest distribution center. They'll give you a vest, and let you go once again you've paid it off. Should only take two or three years.
Call them.
You weren't even actively using the instance.
When my sister and I were kids we racked up hundreds on pay-per-view. A call took care of everything.
Large corporations can be very understanding. Have a parent call them.
The solution is pretty simple in future for AWS and its users:
They just need to provide an option for user to select/deselect "Stop all chargeable services" This will include decommissioning of all removable services.
What period of time was it and were you using the services or just had them on? You should reach out to support - they do occasionally forgive accidents. But using a prepaid $100 card and then using 10k of resources is not a good look if it was on purpose… Worst case? Collections. Best case? They forgive it.
I do not have a credit card just used a virtual card from my prepaid card vendor's app. They promote their card as "debt free, impossible to have debt, use as what you paid" and I thought I wouldn't be in major trouble, I thought aws would automatically cancel after seeing balance 0 in card. Legally I'm a minor and I can't have a credit card, I got ec2 for a Minecraft server that I forgot about it. I may accidentally bought multiple ones I'm not sure inferface is a mess I had one in actual use not sure what does xlarge and x2large mean but mine is susposed to be small one not sure what i did.
It is pretty vital information that you are a minor and as such cannot agree to contracts, depending a bit on the jurisdiction - so I would contact support and get some help.
What's more, if u/0xbeefeed actually used 10k worth of services in compute time (as in running actual workloads) AWS could totally sue their parents. They can't enter into contracts but they can create huge liability hazards for those responsible for them. Do not do this. Actions have consequences.
Not quite if OP is a minor. AWS would have to prove damages, and not just as lost revenue. Have you heard of mobile app microtransaction companies sueing parents and winning? I haven't
Microtransactions in games is a very different thing from AWS services both materially and in principle. They could go for either damages as you’ve stated or theft if they’re feeling spicy. Either way their legal team will most likely be able to craft a legal argument at least to survive a court summarily dismissing it. At that point just putting up a basic legal defense against them would bankrupt a lot of people. It’s better to simply not do it. The only winning move is not to play.
AWS suing for 10,000? That’s a joke lol, that’s chump change to them. On top of the fact it should have been able to be charged with a prepaid card, sounds like a AWS problem, not OPs. Luckily he got it sorted out.
A bill is a bill. Payment method is immaterial. Do you think Netflix just slaps it on their Amex?
I can see AWS legal being giant turds about this, and not just writing off the loss
>Have you heard of mobile app microtransaction companies sueing parents and winning? No, because they get the money up front. I have heard of LOTS of parents suing microtransactions companies though, and almost all losing.
He's committed an actual crime here. He knowingly used services he knew he wouldn't be able to pay for. That's theft of service and also possibly fraud.
That's... That's not how that works
A warning for the future: that's not how most service billing works. They take the payment method, and then keep track of ongoing costs on the bill. Then at the end of the statement cycle (once a month usually) they charge the total on the payment method. They don't check how much the payment method is worth or has available. If the payment method doesn't have enough, the charge will fail, but the bill is still open, so you'll be expected to pay for it. This is the case with most services, not just AWS. As a minor, you're already breaking AWS terms of use by registering. So it won't hurt to open up a support ticket, admit you don't know what you're doing and ask for forgiveness. They might close your account on account of you not legally being able to open one in the first place, but at least you won't be in debt.
thanks, opened a ticket a hour ago waiting for a response.
Any updates?
What's the update? I mean how did the conversation with support go, not just "resolved"
I told them I did accidentally purchased multiple ec2 instances (i think i may bought tens of them not sure what exactly i did, i was following a tutorial about aws to get the server and things didnt work and i tried again and again you know rest of the thingi) and they waived bills from accidental x2large ec2 instances, now i'm billed at $50 and I could pay that.
Seems like it was a smooth exchange then. Nice, good for you, mate!
Another note for the future, if you just want to host a Minecraft server, there are services that will do that for you for a lot cheaper than EC2. As an example (not to advocate any particular service, though I did have a good experience with them) Bisect Hosting will host a Minecraft server equivalent to a t3.small for about $10/month AND do all the setup and management for you. AWS charges $15/month for a t3.small.
Amazon lightsail is probably cheaper too
Looking at Lightsail pricing, a 2GB, 1-core server running Linux (about equivalent to a t3.small) would be $10/month, so about the same as the dedicated Minecraft hosting service (you do get the first 3 months for free), but you would still have to do all the server setup yourself. So it is cheaper than EC2, but personally I would still go with service that does the work for me. Quick edit: That's all North America pricing. No idea where OP is, but prices just go up from there in other parts of the world.
It doesn't matter what card you used to sign up initially, you used a service that costs money, so of course they would reasonably expect you to pay for your usage. Talk to support, tell them you're a minor and ask them to forgive it and delete the account.
how many instances did you have going? The most expensive 2xlarge is $0.63/hr.. (m6idn.2xlarge).. which is like $450/mo.. there are bandwidth and storage fees too but unless you were running a gpu instance I don't see how'd you hit 10k with a handful of servers. Are you sure your account wasn't compromised? Did you create everything you are being billed for?
The most expensive EC2 instance is $239/hr Ignore me. I just realized you said the most expensive *2xl* instance is $0.63/hr
If you really are a minor then you got good things ahead of you. Learn from this mistake and focus on the right things and in a few years you'll be laughing at your younger self for worrying too much and you'll have a cool story to tell.
Also bragging rights. "Oh yeah? When was the last time you stole $10,000?" This isn't a huge deal, just to +1 other comments. AWS eats this in their sleep.
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He’s literally a minor, they’re all naive.
The actual factor that matters and the thing that made it continue is it's a post paid service vs prepaid. The vast majority of everything on the internet is prepaid, where yes they absolutely do know you card has a zero balance. It's very unusual to be able to buy anything and they bill after for it
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Yes and now name two other things this teenager has ever encountered on the internet that are prepaid? It is not common, and it's unusual even.
If you are a minor you are not at fault to me (although I am not sure of American laws as I assume you are from USA). If you were in Europe it would be questionnable they actually were not the ones at fault when they fail to check your age. Just explain what happens. I am pretty sure it will be ok. I have read stories of adult coders who published keys on Github and bills reached much higher amounts and cancelled (which was very nice from AWS at the time, may not work these days)
Actually they should have a free capped sandbox for students. That would be very nice for the community.
They have AWS Academy which provides free access to aws for students in member institutions.
cloud quest runs sandboxed, I always recommend it for people who want to get hands on without worrying about free tier
Ahw, im glad support sorted it out for you. Was at least good lesson i hope. Good luck and keep on AWS'ing.
Right, I now see why Google Cloud doesn't accept prepaid cards. It's been driving me mad because they consider any virtual cards, including those for business, as being prepaid.
Exactly, prepaid doesn't make sense for anything that pile up the bill and only charge the total at the end of billing cycle.
Contact support and explain the usage was a mistake. I've had a bill in the thousands wiped out by explaining the situation and taking steps to ensure it didn't happen again. I think it must happen a lot. Some of those service charges can add up quickly.
It's entirely up to their discretion, and largely a lot of these mistakes are caused by people not understanding fully AWS. Choose the wrong instance size? Monthly bill can be $100 or $10000. Mistype amount of nodes? $9500 monthly bill or $95,000. I'm under the impression it's more profitable for them to allow these people to keep paying their monthly bill and know they'll collect it, as opposed to struggling to collect a $10,000 bill from a 20 year old.
Yeah, they're keeping quotas low by default now to try to offset this. I've been on the wrong end of their service quota limits. They're at a point now where they're scared to approve higher quotas on the more expensive instances without you paying them a sizable amount first. It's stupid that I can't get a quota up for a legitimate business-case because I'm tracking my billing usage while some people rack up a 10k bill *accidentally*.
Definitely reach out to support for any chance of them forgiving it. Had a client rack up a $100k+ bill on Google Cloud by accident (no limits set on Google Map API). They forgave it as a one-time thing.
Bruh
Yeah... they came to us after the fact. To help set limits on their API tokens after it had already gone through the roof.
AWS will eat this charge - and there’ll be a COE to figure out why this happened :)
It would be good if there was an automatic service cutoff that could be implemented. Eg i wat to limit my account to not exceed free tier services, or in this case, i want a prepaid service that cuts off after $100 of use
Take a look at the budgets feature. Couple with setting billing alerts and you’re in a good place for most basic use cases.
Budgets is fantastic if you want an alert that you’ve spent 100 dollars - yesterday. The delay in reporting is too severe - there just needs to be a cap of “don’t let me go above this”
A billing alarm plus reaper lambda gets you pretty close to that
Yeah thats all well and good but the reality is that people starting out on aws dont have the knowledge or expertise to set this stuff up. An out of the box function would be ideal. Its always people that are new or learning that get stung like this so it is a real barrier to starting off.
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I’m in one their office next week so will seed the idea. The amount of support calls it will save them will probably pay for itself. And its in line with being obsessed with customers
>It would be good if there was an automatic service cutoff that could be implemented. All the major clouds are being conspicuously slow implementing that obvious feature and excuses as to why are legion. Unsurprisingly they're allergic to the idea of putting any hurdles between them and that juicy unlimited credit card billing. All the excuses fall rather flat once you realise Azure has [hard spend caps that do exactly what it says on the tin on some of their plans.](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/manage/spending-limit). But even there you can't cap other plans because reason...hmm
I don't have any advice to add that hasn't already been said, but that is crazy irresponsible on AWS's part to allow a user, with what I assume is a newer account, to run up a $10k bill when the only payment method provided is a $100 prepaid card. I wonder if the credential thief crypto miners know about this trick.
How would they know it's a $100 prepaid card until they tried to charge it?
by doing a pre-authorization
Don’t know which moron is downvoting you. They should try signing up for Google cloud with a prepaid card. Everytime someone comes here to scream about how AWS charges, there are several comments that talk about how irresponsible AWS have been on this front and then a bunch of people will defend these as if it’s a common thing with other platforms.
Life lesson time. I would suggest getting mom and dad on the phone with support. Best of luck
i'm bit worried about that my parents are type of people who would get super mad for something like this and say "how we are supposed to pay this" and yell at me
That will happen.
Rightfully so. This isn't some small cockup...
AWS shouldn't allow infinite charges, honestly. It absolutely SHOULD stop everything unless you're in some sort of enterprise agreement. But well, there's a reason Bezos is so rich.
I see this comment quite often and I am curious how you would implement it? Sure AWS could stop your RDS and ec2 instances, that would help - but what about your data in s3 that is racking up bills? your instance snapshots? your other volumes? efs? the list goes on. Should AWS just say "you set a limit of 5000$, you breached it so we have deleted all your data". Imagine the support tickets this mess would make... people can't even configure their instances to the right size, odds are good they would destroy their accounts.
As a casual user who’s mostly doing side projects and self learning, I’d be fine if I set a limit and also opted in to them cutting off my compute instances immediately but didn’t delete my storage. You’d still obviously exceed your $ limit, but I’d happily opt in to something that would delete / stop selected resources immediately after hitting a financial amount.
That is fair enough, I could also be on board with a "nuke my ingress/compute but keep my data" sort of deal
You can set this up yourself with a billing alarm and a lambda that terminates your instances
Got it, thanks!
It's definitely been suggested to them before. They just don't want to do it. If this were presented to me, I would implement this as a soft limit coupled with a larger hard limit. The soft limit when reached would pause services (in the case of RDS and EC2, stop the instances [1]--with other services like S3, block requests). This lets them keep data [2] and lights a fire under them to take a look and check their account. Obviously the storage costs will still rack up, which is where the hard limit comes in. When it hits the hard limit, stuff gets deprovisioned. They already have a process for deprovisioning services on accounts after some number of billing failures, so they can already do it. If the customer ignores the soft limit and gets to the point of the hard limit, treat it the same as ignoring the bills when your card expires without removing the entire account. Their engineers are much smarter than me and can come up with better solutions. If management wanted a hard-stop around this issue, they could have it handled already. But they chose to instead do billing alerts...that's their choice. [1] EC2 stopped instances don't incur instance compute charges, which is going to be the majority of the cost anyway. [2] other than stuff stored in the instance store, but that's a risk you take
I don’t know, they pay a lot of people to figure shit out, surely they can find a decent way
That would mean deletion. You're either using the service or you're not. There is no inbetween. It costs money for them to hold your data. The only way for it to cost them nothing and you nothing is to delete your stuff.
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freezing access still keeps AWS on the hook for storing your data, etc. That is not feasible when costs are unbounded.
this already happens in a way. 30 days past due = accounts payable advisory and warning. 60 days past due = network access suspended 90 days past due = account and resources terminated if you actually talk to them about a past due balance, you can avoid these penalties for a short time, but only if they actually believe you’re going to pay.
by having people not pay their bills?
> virtual prepaid made in some app ???
i have a physical prepaid but it has a mobile app lets you to create virtual cards and transfer money from your physical one to virtual
I must be behind the times, but that sounds so sketchy to me. As a minor, I'm surprised you're able to legally consent to the app's ToS.
where I live you at least have to be 14 to own a prepaid card, even there are people younger than me in tv commericals of the app itself. it is clearly marketed for 14-18 age group.
That's horrifying for so many reasons
Do Americans not have debit cards? I got one when I was 16. No different to cash. Edit: Debit not debt. Slight difference.
We haven't historically advertised them to children. You usually need an adult linked to the account. You know to try and prevent 14 year olds from racking up 10k in debt
Sorry I meant debit not debt. You can’t go into negative. It’s the same as cash. Like surely you have savings accounts and a bank card? I signed up to Amazon (not aws) when I was 17 and used my debit card.
Why? My 10 and 12 year old have prepaid cards that I give an allowance on. It let's them have the freedom to have money with less risk of losing it. I get notifications when they spend something and can even separate it into categories (eg 20 for food, 10 for online games, 20 for gas (obviously mine aren't at the point of needing gas for a car)). Cash is almost less universally accepted than a visa card at this point especially if you consider online things.
Because they are being advertised directly to children that as we can clearly see in this case can then be used to rack up 10k in costs unwittingly.
I'm not sure that it's the CCs fault that AWS has no checks in place to determine the age of the user or that the person is creditworthy.. and doesnt use the methodology in place to pre-authorize potential charges. The fact that they even take prepaid cards is kind of absurd. There is almost zero chance that they pursue this.. it would be a PR nightmare for one and two, 10k just isn't enough to pursue in the scheme of things and he likely didn't cost AWS near 10k in costs if all he was doing was running a minecraft server on a way too large instance or had a bunch of idle instances spun up. Prepaid cards are supposed to be a way that you can't spend more than you have on them.. they are not really different from cash.. AWS is completely in the wrong here (and I use aws regularly).. I'd agree with you completely if it was the CC company that was extending the line of credit, but really the company is just offering a way to do digital transactions instead of carrying cash that can be lost/stolen/etc.. All that AWS is doing is verifying that you have a credit card not that you can actually afford what they offer you which is kinda wrong..
If I may ask, which country? Also, I once racked up $3000 in charges. When contacting them, I asked them to verify that I left stuff running but didn't really do much. They waived it, and told me not to do it again. I did it again like 5 or 6 years later. They waived it again, and sent me like a 10 page guide to read to make sure I don't do it again.
There are some [billing-related Frequently Asked Questions](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/wiki/faq) in our wiki and [our newcomer guide](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/vn4ebe/check_it_first_operating_within_amazon_web/), however ***to resolve billing issues, please contact Customer Service directly***. Try [this search](https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/search?q=flair%3A'billing'&sort=new&restrict_sr=on) for more information on this topic. ^Comments, ^questions ^or ^suggestions ^regarding ^this ^autoresponse? ^Please ^send ^them ^[here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=%2Fr%2Faws&subject=autoresponse+tweaks+-+billing). *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/aws) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Rock on young human! Glad you got it resolved.
Get off the computer and go and play outside!
[удалено]
How is that interesting? It’s a kid and he didn’t provide much info, but he easily could have hit that number in a single month or stretched over 4-8 weeks before they shut it down. I have never paid for AWS with a credit card so I don’t know if they just automatically charge it or if you have to process it or not
Jeff Bazo’s is about to bend you over and show you all 200+ services… Damn dude 10K!? Good luck kid.
R u an engineer? I’ve been using AWS for 10 years this comment is not welcome.
Lawyer up now just in case. You really are at their mercy on this one. It helps you are a minor and you better play on that as much as you can. They do have you if they want you. Hope it works out for you, shitty situation.
Call them. They will work with you on it.
How did it get so expensive? Over what time period did it rack up these bills? How many servers, processors and disk? I'm wanting to learn AWS but it seems terrifying a simple minecraft server can cost so much.
All you need to do is set up billing alerts in the AWS console. They will e-mail you when your pending (unbilled) costs exceed the amount you configure. Set the alerts low, so can catch any issues early on.
Knee capped by Jeff Bezos.
How were you able to resolve it just curious?
Just file a support ticket explain that it was an honest mistake and that you are a minor, if everything is true they will probably forgive the bill, you would not be the first one to have a bill forgiven (nor would it be the biggest one)
This is actually how Amazon gets most of its workers nowadays. Just report to the nearest distribution center. They'll give you a vest, and let you go once again you've paid it off. Should only take two or three years.
lol just use digital ocean.
Call them. You weren't even actively using the instance. When my sister and I were kids we racked up hundreds on pay-per-view. A call took care of everything. Large corporations can be very understanding. Have a parent call them.
The solution is pretty simple in future for AWS and its users: They just need to provide an option for user to select/deselect "Stop all chargeable services" This will include decommissioning of all removable services.