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.
AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
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Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#12Even 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.
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#13After 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…
OP did say PER MONTH. They implied $18,000 total.
I'd start with doing a full chargeback for all months, and provide as much documentation.
Additionally, I'd reach out to folks like Ars Technica, after ensuring such an issue was not a result of my own error.
One big red flag with this story is that OP seemingly did not notice $1,500/mo coming out of his account. That is most certainly something that anyone would have noticed, even someone making a few million a year, and if you make that much money, you definitely are paying an accountant to manage your accounts.
The story smells off.
EDIT: Oh and I'm not denying that customer support at AWS and other places has gone way downhill which IS a problem, however, there is no way this story is realistically true. At the very least, the numbers were inflated in order to draw in attention. No normal person overlooks an additional $1,500+ per month bill on their bank statement. Even small businesses would've been all over that. I know, I've worked for and managed them, along with being a senior software engineer and manager.
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#14Next time use Hetzner.
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#15This is hindsight but managing your domain separately from your cloud provider might be a good idea.
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#16Either 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.
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#17I 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?
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#18They 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.
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#19I 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?
Re: AWS won't discuss my bill, suspended my account, took $1,600, still no human
#20There’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?