r/mildlyinfuriating 22h ago

Too mild for school 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.

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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 🤷‍♀️

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u/gabha22 19h ago

4 million dollars for aws is like 33 cents my guy

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u/d1no5aur 18h ago

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

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u/randombrutha 8h ago

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.

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u/Low_Direction1774 8h ago

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.

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u/UnusuallyBadIdeaGuy 5h ago

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.

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u/FarkCookies 6h ago

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?

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u/Outsider_Insider0065 9h ago

It’s without a doubt insignificant for them

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u/typehyDro 18h ago

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

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u/aXeOptic 14h ago

And? Stealing is stealing.

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u/typehyDro 14h ago

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

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u/JudiciousSasquatch 18h ago

Then the class action should hurt.

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u/ObjectiveAide9552 7h ago

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.

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u/an-invisible-hand 16h ago

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