HN Explorer

AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human

116 points by gadjonesq ↗ HN
AWS has been charging me $1,500/month for near-zero usage. For over a year. That is more than $18,000 for infrastructure I barely use.

I tried multiple times to get a human on the phone to discuss it. Every time I requested a callback, AWS would call, a bot would tell me the human wasn't available, and promise a callback. No human ever called back.

So I stopped paying. Why keep paying charges I believe are wrong when the company won't discuss them?

AWS emailed asking if my case was resolved — from a no-reply address. Nobody followed up.

Feb 19: AWS suspended my account. Route 53 DNS down. Domain, business email, website — all dead instantly.

Feb 21: I paid the $1,600 outstanding bill. AWS took the money. Account stayed locked. Why? While I was resolving that bill, another $1,500 bill came in. But because they had already locked me out, I couldn't see it, access it, or pay it. They kept me locked out over a bill they wouldn't let me pay.

The catch-22: my support plan included callbacks when the account was active. Suspending the account killed my support tier. So now I can't request a callback because I'm no longer on a plan that gets callbacks. Because they suspended it.

I can't get support because they killed my support tier. I can't pay the bill because they locked me out of the console. Every support channel is a dead end — phones loop, emails bounce, forms require the login they disabled, can't even create a new account because my phone number is blocked.

@AWSSupport on X responded in seconds, pushed me to DMs, promised internal escalation. 24+ hours later, nothing.

Here is what I think is really happening: AWS has no incentive to resolve billing disputes. Every month of delay is another $1,500. A five-minute call reviewing my CloudWatch metrics would show the charges are wrong — but that call would cost them $1,500/month in revenue. Instead they are holding my domain, my email, and my website hostage.

What I want is simple:

1. Turn my DNS back on right now. There is no justification for holding my domain and email hostage over a billing dispute. 2. Call me — a human — to review a year of invoices. Based on my actual usage, AWS owes me thousands back, not the other way around.

Day 4. Emails will start permanently bouncing within 24-48 hours.

Case 177075616300933. Has anyone gotten through this? Any path to a real person when your account is suspended?

27 comments

[ 203 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] thread
amelius
Credit card chargeback, simple. Only way to make companies listen.
Linkd
The only way to get your account shutdown faster than waiting the 60+ days for unpaid invoices.

It sounds like OP provisioned services, didn't use it, ignored it, and is now paying the price.

throwaway2037
After 30 days, file a petition with in your local small claims court. Your amount is well within the limit for all 50 US states. They are probably tons of blog posts and YouTube videos that explain how to self-service in your state. Also, write a letter to your state district attorney to explain your situation. As an alternative strategy, continue to post on X about your incident in hopes that AWS will be "embarassed into action".
allynjalford
Switch your domain to Cloudflare. Setup the DNS there for your e-mail.
pensatoio
I'd immediately chargeback any subsequent charges. That's what it's for. You have nobody to talk to and no other recourse (unless you hire a lawyer.)

Probably a great reminder for everyone not to park your domain in the same place you do everything else.

Also, why are you paying 18k for resources you aren't using?

kstrauser
I don’t want to victim blame… but I’m gonna. You’ve been paying $18K per year for infra you don’t use? Can I get in on this action? I’ll rent you some of my home lab for half the price.

But AWS doesn’t charge by the usage of allocated resources. They charge by the allocation of those resources. Have 50 EC2 instances at 0% CPU? Amazon sat them aside for you, as promised, yet you chose not to use what you paid for. That’s not their fault.

By analogy, a restaurant charges you for a steak, whether or not you eat it. Unless it’s defective, you bought it and you pay for it. And if you don’t want to donate $1500/mo to the AWS Steak House, stop ordering the ribeye.

bstsb
this sounds wrong. billing is usage-based - what were you even paying for? it's very possible that you had some random metric somewhere which had crazy usage.
causal
AWS has so many internal gates, it quickly devolves into Kafkaesque hell if you get off the happy path. We had an account which was flagged as suspicious because we...signed up to use credits that AWS offered us, which apparently immediately triggers a bunch of limits and blocks. But many of them are invisible until we run into one, then file a ticket, and play the waiting game...
Tiberium
I'm sorry for the issue, though I couldn't help but notice - you want to talk to a real human, yet this very post is completely LLM-written/edited.
josecapurro
Even with partners, their support is pure, absolute garbage. My partner login was closed after a month of emails and automated messages with "useful" instructions for recovering access to my account. I'm glad we are going to drop them as technology partners.

I think if you, from the US (i believe), cannot get them to help you, i (from a third world country) don't stand a chance.

osigurdson
This is hindsight but managing your domain separately from your cloud provider might be a good idea.
throwaway290
Either I'm stupid or this is a big red flag. AWS has a billing dashboard that exactly says where money goes (and predicts spending for next month). If they are wrong why not just post here the wrong line? Or if they are charging you more than billing dashboard show then that's the headline right?

The whole thing of paying $1500 per month for "near zero usage" ENTIRE year without complaining or checking billing is nuts. Am I just poor or is it a result of American credit card based system?

By the way if you think AWS cares how much you use EC2 instances that you provisioned you are mistaken. EC2 is a VPS. You wouldn't expect Hetzner to charge you less if you rented a server and then didn't use it.

Imustaskforhelp
I am curious but I remember someone saying long time ago when someone else told a similar situation as to yours but with microsoft and people praised amazon.

They said that with the Ai chat bot, you can just say contact me with a human, and a human can/would then must be contacted.

I wonder if this could've been done by you. can anyone who uses amazon's services verify my claims?

AJRF
They have been charging me for £0.79 every month for about 10 years now which I don't pay. I simply can not get in touch with them about it.
WatchDog
I feel like this isn't the whole story. What line items were they billing you for? You couldn't get it resolved for a year? Why not move platforms after a couple of months of this treatment? If you have near zero usage, it shouldn't be that much work to replatform right?
maccard
There’s one piece of information missing from this.

> AWS has been charging me $1,500/month for near-zero usage. For over a year. That is more than $18,000 for infrastructure I barely use.

Did you provision the infrastructure?

celeryd
Did you build in regions you don't even use and then forget about it?
robotswantdata
Something seems off here, OP has an extra $1500 a month for over a year and then finally noticed. They then instead of pausing or migrating “expensive” services, stop paying and then AWS terminate as expected.

Feel there is more to this story than AWS being mean.

You can try emailing garman@amazon.com and complain about the poor AWS customer service with Jeff cc’d.

lazystar
silly AWS, google already went through this infinite loop of bot support. learn from their mistakes.
lopatin
From your post it's not clear that you understand how AWS charges. CloudWatch metrics would only validate your case if these were pay-per-use services like Lambdas or something. But you use the word "infrastructure" which implies you have allocated resources and simply don't use them. That's a valid charge.

Again maybe you are aware, but it wasn't clear from your post.

RobRivera
I see no usage stats, billing itemization, nothing but random accusations that are hearsay at best.

It's 2026.

Go get a lawyer if you feel you're right.

theginger
It's not impossible that the Aws charges were wrong, it's pretty unheard of. I don't understand why the details of the charges aren't mentioned in the post. If you think it's unlikely you could have a $1500 bill because you 'barely use' it then that's just wrong. In the cloud single unoptimised choices can cost thousands if you don't keep an eye on your costs, you need to look at the charges.
dvfjsdhgfv
What you say is missing crucial details, it simply doesn't add up. Near-zero for what? What was it for? Was it the classic "I deployed too many services and forgot to set up budgets" or was there something else?
nurettin
> AWS has been charging me $1,500/month for near-zero usage. For over a year. That is more than $18,000 for infrastructure I barely use

A couple of managed DB instances and a decently sized ec2 will do that.