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AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

aws.amazon.com

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Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#71

Post by nucleardog »

dexterdog wrote: post #27
jjoonathan wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have only asked for one refund, which was clearly the result of a bug on Amazon's part, and they haggled the whole way. They were quick to a 50% refund and slow to a 100% refund.

I've never had a refund denied. One was for 20k on an account that only billed that much monthly. If it's an honest mistake they'll wipe it if you have any history with them.

I've had $30k, and later $120k refunded on an account that billed ~$20-25k monthly. Both covered 100% of the overage.

AWS is the one major tech company where I've never had any issue getting in touch with a real human who has been empowered to actually fix my issues.

The only thing that's been required from us was to show them we were taking reasonable steps to prevent it happening again.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#72

Post by hfern »

toeknee123 wrote: post #65
benjaminwootton wrote: post #37

AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach. I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding. Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it…

We recently helped a small client of ours discover a cost increase where AWS RETROACTIVELY increased their costs for a service near the end of the month for previous days without letting them know. We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices. (I'm a co-founder of CloudForecas…

What was the service that they retroactively increased the cost of?

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#73

Post by CSDude »

toeknee123 wrote: post #65
benjaminwootton wrote: post #37

AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach. I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding. Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it…

We recently helped a small client of ours discover a cost increase where AWS RETROACTIVELY increased their costs for a service near the end of the month for previous days without letting them know. We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices. (I'm a co-founder of CloudForecas…

Which service and whay API?

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#74

Post by Sevii »

koolba wrote: post #60
akh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line Whilst this might sound funny, we were surprised to see it as a common use-cases with users putting https://github.com/infracost/infracost in their CI/CD pipelines to act as safety net. Currently it only works for Terraform users, but we plan to add other infra-as-code tools in the future. We're also discussing how we…

> Perhaps having separate AWS accounts ... You absolutely must, MUST, MUST be using separate AWS accounts for separate purposes. You can have as many as you’d like and roll up the billing into one actual paying account. This is a win for accountability (roll up dev and easily see the split out for separate environments), but more importantly for security as it limits the blast radius for any one environment. Combined…

It may be a 'must' for security but from a UX perspective it is a horrible experience.

Does it make sense for one team to have 10+ AWS accounts per service because 'security'? How about if each team out of 1000s in your company has 10 AWS accounts per service?

We run our service in 3 geographic regions and have a separate AWS account for each region and stage despite each account supporting resources in multiple regions. Considering that we have 4~ services that is roughly 40 AWS accounts for just one team with less than 10 people.

What I'm describing above is the 'best practice' way to manage AWS accounts at scale. It is insane and saying 'security' does not magically make this reasonable.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#75

Post by sokoloff »

koolba wrote: post #13
luxpsycho wrote: post #6

What's the point, if there isn't a discount for paying upfront? Will some people/businesses prefer this because it's not 'credit'—does AWS scrobble to your Credit Report in any country? I am failing to see the appeal here...

For companies operating on a cash basis with a standard Jan-Dec fiscal calendar (e.g. most small businesses), this would allow you to deduct future spending by prepurchasing AWS credits. It locks away whatever money you dedicate to it but that’d be peanuts compared to paying income tax on it in order to carry it forward as retained earnings.

I don't think that works the way you suggest, but I also admit the guidance is unclear.

Reg. Section 1.461-1(a)(1) provides the following:

If an expenditure results in the creation of an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of the taxable year, such an expenditure may not be deductible, or may be deductible only in part, for the taxable year in which made.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.461-1

If you buy 10+ months of AWS credits in December and have a Jan-Dec fiscal year, I'd argue that you bought "an asset having a useful life which extends substantially beyond the close of your taxable year"

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#77

Post by varelse »

academia_hack wrote: post #4

I really wish you could just designate a group of resources as unimportant, set a billing limit, and let Amazon nuke everything / delete your files / whatever, if you go over the limit. Everytime I try to learn cloud infrastructure stuff I'm terrified of the literally infinite bill that might show up from a typo a month down the line.

Single most obvious customer obsessed (their tenet BTW) feature they could add, but after over a decade of requests, it's seemingly clear they won't. It keeps me from playing with AWS for side projects as well. Their loss.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#78

Post by toast0 »

simonw wrote: post #62
akh wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also been thinking about that! I wonder if https://archive.org/web/ is an alternative though, as in could I pay them so they could mirror it for a 100 years?

I would absolutely love to be able to donate a domain name to the Internet Archive plus a lump sum cash donation and have them keep it hosted in perpetuity.

Sign me up too, I've got a (very small) site that I would like to outlive me; my plan is to attempt to set it up with a large balance at NearlyFreeSpeach.net and also put the account identifier in an HTML comment so that motivated people could increase its balance in the future.

I would be very interested in other credible perpetual hosting plans.

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#79

Post by prionassembly »

zodiakzz wrote: post #52

I wish Digital Ocean would allow this. My country's debit/credit cards don't work online reliably, my attached cards can start getting rejected randomly any time. I'm always nervous about getting my account suspended due to missed payments, DO is pretty forgiving thankfully.

They do with PayPal at least.

Their emails even use language like "you need to top up your account".

Re: AWS now allows customers to pay for their usage in advance

#80

Post by scrollaway »

toeknee123 wrote: post #65
benjaminwootton wrote: post #37

AWS billing practices are horrible, and they are increasingly more “Oracle” like in their approach. I had a security issue related to a SaaS product which led to a $7k AWS line item when someone started sending a LIST request to S3 buckets billions of times. They would not consider refunding. Now I’m having a bunch of problems terminating some AWS Orgs accounts and they are being deliberately difficult in getting it…

We recently helped a small client of ours discover a cost increase where AWS RETROACTIVELY increased their costs for a service near the end of the month for previous days without letting them know. We were a bit shocked to see this happen and it was a very subtle increase that was sort of hidden in Cost Explorer unless you spent hours digging into it and comparing your past invoices. (I'm a co-founder of CloudForecas…

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
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