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

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?

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".

Doesn't AWS make you agree to arbitration? Unsure how Small Claims Courts plays with that.

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.

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.