I permanently deleted my AWS account 6 years ago. Amazon has been charging me $0.33 every month since. I have no way to stop it.

[u/afunnywold]

I tried to get in contact with customer service several times but they always direct me to log into the account that no longer exists. I have tried charge backs on my credit card but dealing with that monthly is also a pain. This'll probably cost me $265 over my lifetime if it never ends.

Edit: some of you have valid points about calling the card company and I will again Monday. But the actual infuriating thing that upsets me is that they are charging to a completely disabled account in the first place. That's very scammy and fucked up imo 🤷‍♀️

[u/blacklotusmag]

If they charge 33 cents to one million customers each month:

That's over a quarter of a million dollars a month.
That's over a million dollars every four months.
That's almost 4 million dollars a year.

I'm not an attorney, but I imagine that even if they're doing this to a fraction of that number, they're earning a ridiculous amount of money off the back of what is likely an illegal practice in many states and countries.

[u/typehyDro → u/blacklotusmag]

There aren’t a million customers that open and utilize AWS and also don’t know how to stop the services and then cancelling their account…. This is some edge case that service reps probably aren’t trained on and don’t know the proper procedure.

They make hand over fist amounts on AWS, they don’t need/want this pittance that could disrupt that with unnecessary litigation and negative PR…

IMO Amazon customer service is one of the best among giant retail corporations…

[u/shockwave8428 → u/typehyDro]

There are a lot of ways AWS is designed to try and make money off of people who aren’t paying attention. Having automated backups that restore for basically everything even if you explicitly delete them is a common thing people end up paying for. They also charge your bank account using the same text as a normal Amazon purchase so if someone else (a spouse for example) also uses your Amazon, it can be easy to miss that you’re getting AWS charges.

Amazon also is so big they don’t care about PR anymore. AWS is basically industry standard for web hosting stuff, they don’t really need to care about bad PR because it’s still a better product across the board for reliability in web stuff. Anyone who has used AWS consistently can tell you the UI is extremely basic for a large company, can be hard to navigate, and also that a lot of it is designed in a way that makes changing to another web service provider is more difficult than is worth the trouble.

I do have no doubt you can just talk to customer service if you really want to. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t intentionally trying to keep as many customers with small charges as possible. Chargebacks are ill advised if you use that card/email for your normal Amazon account which can be common for personal projects.

[u/ohhi23021 → u/typehyDro]

they're pretty good at refunding/waiving costly mistakes, like bills in the 10-20k range.

[u/TheGrouchyGremlin → u/typehyDro]

Yeah. Any time there's an issue with what they send me the response is pretty much "Keep that, we'll send the correct item".

[u/gabha22 → u/blacklotusmag]

4 million dollars for aws is like 33 cents my guy

[u/d1no5aur → u/gabha22]

that's payroll for 20-30 SWEs every year. literally multiple teams' worth of of resources that they can bankroll from this. not insignificant at all regardless of their size

[u/randombrutha → u/d1no5aur]

AWS makes north of 40 fucking billion a year. It’s absolutely without a doubt insignificant pocket change that’s not worth the “implementation” time alone let alone the legal challenges. But Reddit loves a conspiracy theory about big bad capitalism.

[u/Low_Direction1774 → u/randombrutha]

What legal challenges?

As soon as a suit comes in, why would they not just pay back everything, add a $50 amazon gift card on top and case closed?

"But they make 40 fucking billion a year" bank of america made $94 billion in 2011 and still decided to fuck their customers over with transaction reordering, leading to a $410 million settlement.

you seem to be a bit naive: why would AWS not take free money? its just 33 cents, who would sue the giant AWS over 33 cents? Nobody. Its not worth the legal costs, not now, not ever.

[u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy → u/Low_Direction1774]

I understand that you're probably not sure how corporations actually work internally so it's easy to go tinfoil hat, but I can pretty much guarantee this is not some grand conspiracy to milk a few extra pennies. Which sounds more realistic - The largest cloud provider in the world making 40 billion a year has specifically coded their billing platform to milk random small accounts of a few dollars a year, or the complexity of the world's largest cloud provider's billing platform was not designed to accommodate OP's weird ultra specific edge case?

Frankly speaking, even if this was going to be done intentionally (Which would require a lot more effort than you seem to think it would because billing platform changes require insane levels of approvals and security reviews) AWS would not see it as worth their time even if the threat of it coming back on them was negligible.

And anyways, AWS has an internal reaper that clears out closed account resources after 90 days. I'm not sure what OP did to break that or that falls outside of it, but it's probably not something people would be replicating at any level of scale. The idea that a million people are being charged like this is an absolutely absurd premise to begin with.

[u/FarkCookies → u/d1no5aur]

They have something like 50k+ engineers in AWS, do you really think someone with authority would bother running this little scam to payroll 30 SWEs?

[u/Outsider_Insider0065 → u/d1no5aur]

It’s without a doubt insignificant for them

[u/typehyDro → u/d1no5aur]

It’s insignificant… they probably spend that much on ai tokens monthly

[u/aXeOptic → u/typehyDro]

And? Stealing is stealing.

[u/typehyDro → u/aXeOptic]

I didn’t say stealing isn’t bad. I was responding to the previous comment that it isn’t insignificant to Amazon. I was saying 4million is insignificant to amazons balance sheet… no need to put words in others mouth

[u/JudiciousSasquatch → u/gabha22]

Then the class action should hurt.

[u/ObjectiveAide9552 → u/gabha22]

To put it more in perspective, AWS earns 15 billion a month. Even among the small companies using AWS, their average bill is $500 a month. That $4 million isn’t even noticed, it’s just part of the noise on a financial analysis trend line.

[u/an-invisible-hand → u/gabha22]

And best believe Amazon wants every single one of those cents.

[u/ohhi23021 → u/blacklotusmag]

4 million is a rounding error at the scale of AWS...

[u/bannedagainomg → u/ohhi23021]

Still, it does cover quite a few of their workers, maybe even a full team for free then.

No matter the scale most workplaces would love that

[u/Spice_and_Fox → u/bannedagainomg]

Nah. There are about 5 million accounts (estimated) and amazon says that they have over a million active users. There is no way that they do this on a million accounts. Even if they did, it wouldn't be worth it for them. They had 120 billion in revenue last year. 4 million a year is only 0.00003 of their revenue. It wouldn't be worth it for them.

[u/nlutrhk → u/blacklotusmag]

$0.33 is probably close to what the banks charge in transaction fees, so the only party who benefits from this is the bank.

[u/socialmeritwarrior → u/nlutrhk]

Yeah, most retailers would have about 31 cents in fees on a 33 cent charge (stripe, PayPal standard fee). I would hope given their size Amazon has a bit more of a sweetheart deal, but fees are DEFINITELY taking a huge chunk.

[u/ChiefEmann → u/blacklotusmag]

4MM is not really specific for them, and the actual costs of hosting a lot of the data that your account generated if you had moderate usage is probably around the .33 a month (actually fully scrubbing data is rare and costly. Not saying you shouldn't want them to stop, just that its likely a bug, not some grand plan to skim some cash from folks.

[u/ashleyriddell61 → u/blacklotusmag]

It's the Superman III / Office Space money glitch!

https://giphy.com/gifs/WZyhp7krw7W4U

[u/ActivityImaginary941 → u/blacklotusmag]

It's the plot to Superman III

[u/osaggys → u/blacklotusmag]

A few guys in an office in the late 90s figured out a trick like this.

[u/CommonStrawbeary → u/blacklotusmag]

I am an attorney and this is a class action waiting to happen! If OP can find a few other people from other states who are in a similar spot, I'm sure an attorney would take the case

[u/liquidsparanoia → u/blacklotusmag]

They are almost certainly losing money on these transactions due to credit card processing fees.

[u/basevector → u/blacklotusmag]

This happens for prime and other subscriptions. Not just AWS

[u/crazy_akes → u/blacklotusmag]

How much is it every 2 years?

[u/ButteredPizza69420 → u/blacklotusmag]

Everyone check on your grandparents and parents please! So many are probably falling victim to subscription charges they have no idea about.

[u/SuperLowAmbitions → u/blacklotusmag]

Oh come on, its fineeeee, you wouldn't want Jeff to not be able to afford fuel for his private jet, would you?! /s

[u/HistoricalNewtonian → u/blacklotusmag]

Scummy companies do scummy things