AWS charged me $500 over 4 years for a “free” micro instance
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.
When I got in touch with AWS customer services about this they just told me to get lost.
Legally AWS may be skirting around consumer protection regulations with the way they market AWS free as free credits rather than a free service.
There are laws like 15 USC Ch. 110: ONLINE SHOPPER PROTECTION §8403. "Negative option marketing on the Internet" which are designed to prevent companies from automatically and silently upgrading customers from a free trial to a paid product.
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' bad behavior.
18 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 44.8 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
Once my account was dry I found out via the bank (+associated bank charges on top, of course)
The funds were being withdrawn month-to-month.
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?
But also there is IMO a reasonable expectation of a confirmation moving from free to paid service.
I do think your telling other people to be careful of the terms they might have blindly accepted is totally reasonable, but where I at least found your original post kinda off is you are not taking responsibility for your mistake and instead are blaming Amazon. Just my 2 cents.
- sure, but that's a low standard and I'd like to see it raised over time with new legislation.
I found out when my bank informed me that my account was overdrawn (it was an account I was no longer using, due to an international move)