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Impossible to cancel AWS – must pay them forever for zombie services?

38 points by v3rt3x ↗ HN
I had a business that used AWS which shutdown over two years ago. I am NOT a developer. I've tried repeatedly to shutdown services on AWS and stop the bleeding. I've contacted support and they give me the run-around. One of the key issues is that there is a sub-organization linked to my account which has some invalid user email addresses linked to it. However, AWS policy is that I must migrate these accounts and provide a valid credit card for them! This is impossible because they aren't real addresses. AWS under no circumstances will shut down my account on my behalf, but it is impossible to satisfy the conditions of cancelability... I asked the support rep then if I must pay monthly charges forever and got the standard BS response. This seems like a criminal racket... Anyway, I canceled my credit card and am wiping my hands of it. The monthly bill is down to $30 or so. Will they come after me for this? Somebody should start a class-action lawsuit to end this crazy practice. They literally make it impossible to cancel an account under some circumstances.

16 comments

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wmf
Some consultant could fix your account (either by knowing how to fix the subaccounts or knowing the magic incantation to tell AWS to kill them) but of course it would cost much more than simply paying the bill.
anderiv
Amazon rightly is very careful about closing accounts. This is why you have had a hard time thus far. When you say “invalid email accounts”, what do you mean? Are they perhaps addresses on a domain that you control? If so, it’s a very simple fix. You just re-create those addresses, then go through the “forgot password” process to regain access to those accounts.

If the addresses are on a domain that you do not control, well, that’s a lesson learned for you I think. In this case, you’ll need to continue working with support to explore what can be done.

nicd
We faced a similar problem with consultants on an old AWS account that had become obsolete. A week of back-and-forth with support ensued as we tried to figure out how to close the account. The process seemed excessively complicated since the only way to remove the consultants, who were merely members and not admins, required them to add a billing method first. It felt unreasonable.

Ultimately, we were able to close the account with the consultants' cooperation.

I get your point that it's wise to remove consultants promptly after their contract concludes, and I agree. However, this doesn't take away from the fact that AWS's account closing policies appear to be less than user-friendly.

nocoiner
No they’re not. I once had an unpaid bill of something like $1.36 from AWS. They shut that down and banned the whole account. I can never again use AWS with that email address lol.
v3rt3x
It's certainly a lesson learned about who to hire and how to wind things down. I wasn't aware there was any issue until I started seeing these charges keep rolling through and had to roll up my sleeves and do my best to resolve it. Just as magazines and other services are not (now) legally allowed to make it difficult to cancel a service - I don't know how AWS can get away with this. If I establish that I am the legal owner of the business entity (who is not technical enough to deal with the problem), which could reasonably be done, it seems perfectly reasonable that there should be some kill switch available. What if I had a rogue employee who setup a run-away process in order to rack up charges? I can appreciate there is a risk management aspect to it for AWS - but this in my view rises to the level of deceptive business practice.
KomoD
> Will they come after me for this?

You'll probably be fine.

liveoneggs
In the parent org account go to https://us-east-1.console.aws.amazon.com/organizations/v2/ho... and you can delete the child account and you should just be on the hook for the 90 days closure period. I think you can also just disassociate (revoke the invitation or similar) the account from the same place.
v3rt3x
Unfortunately, the guy who actually ran this account fat fingered one of the addresses (name@abc.cm instead of name@abc.com) - so there is no way to access the account, put in a credit card, and disassociate it.

I asked them what the process would be if myself or one of these former employees had died - and was given the run-around. Every single thing they told me to do did not work and just exposed another exception.

KomoD
If the typo'd tld was actually .cm then you could cough up the $80 to register that domain.
v3rt3x
Proving my point at the absurdity of this all... No service should be that complicated to shut down that such extreme measures should be required.
KomoD
Yep but not sure you have much choice... Unless you can somehow reach higher level support
liveoneggs
Can you log into the child account directly?

There are multiple contacts in amazon -- Billing, Operations, and Security. If you have access to the Billing email you should use that for contacting them.

Otherwise it looks like a credit card dispute might trigger a cancellation or similar but I don't know for sure.

two_in_one
Sounds like "neverending charging bonanza". Like one sh*tty bank I'm dealing with right now.
v3rt3x
Pretty much. It was so absurd it was almost funny.