I 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?

There’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?

Something seems off here, OP has an extra $1500 a month for over a year and then finally noticed. They then instead of pausing or migrating “expensive” services, stop paying and then AWS terminate as expected.

Feel there is more to this story than AWS being mean.

You can try emailing garman@amazon.com and complain about the poor AWS customer service with Jeff cc’d.

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".

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.

Be careful with a backcharge. As I understand it, if you lose, the decisions are often binding and leave you no other avenue to become whole.

It seems likely they provisioned resources, didn't use them, and expected to not be charged for them without understanding that most AWS resources don't "scale to zero" when left at rest.

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

I'd immediately chargeback any subsequent charges. That's what it's for. You have nobody to talk to and no other recourse (unless you hire a lawyer.)

Probably a great reminder for everyone not to park your domain in the same place you do everything else.

Also, why are you paying 18k for resources you aren't using?

AWS has so many internal gates, it quickly devolves into Kafkaesque hell if you get off the happy path. We had an account which was flagged as suspicious because we...signed up to use credits that AWS offered us, which apparently immediately triggers a bunch of limits and blocks. But many of them are invisible until we run into one, then file a ticket, and play the waiting game...

I see no usage stats, billing itemization, nothing but random accusations that are hearsay at best.

It's 2026.

Go get a lawyer if you feel you're right.

This is hindsight but managing your domain separately from your cloud provider might be a good idea.

Credit card chargeback, simple. Only way to make companies listen.

Easy in the US apparently. My bank refuses that here without (written, signed and sent by post) proof I have been scammed and this case wouldn't be that. It is a credit card, not a debit card. I only have it for hiring cars as many just refuse unless it is a cc.

I’m sometimes surprised at how easy it is to do a chargeback in the US. So much so that a lot of folks just click that button instead of reaching out to the vendor first.

In here (not the US) a chargeback is such a chore that I would only do that as a very last resort.

Not sure which is better though; as a former internet vendor, we blocked cc payments from the US for this very reason. Rather have less clients than being that easily scammed. Here it is too hard, there it is too easy. But hard does mean you have to think about it at least and not 'oh I made an impulse buy, remorse, let's chargeback'.

credit card company’s primary purpose is to protect me, I am making them a ton of money. hence, they should ablige to my every request (stop payment being number one on the list). insane they won’t help you without a ceremony. I never talked to the vendor first, the first thing I do is stop payments through my credit card and then I reach out to vendor.

Not sure if making a company a ton of money has anything to do with obliging anything. Many companies I ship money to (this post for AWS for instance) won't do anything for you at all, except, hopefully mostly, provide the service you paid for. If the credit card company (or it's AI) has any reason to not help you, they won't, guaranteed.

the credit card company makes money each time I tap my card. there has never been a time when they did not oblige to my request (and I was wrong before several times with legit transactions me (or my wife) made and did not recognize).

It's not impossible that the Aws charges were wrong, it's pretty unheard of. I don't understand why the details of the charges aren't mentioned in the post. If you think it's unlikely you could have a $1500 bill because you 'barely use' it then that's just wrong. In the cloud single unoptimised choices can cost thousands if you don't keep an eye on your costs, you need to look at the charges.

I think folks are mis-interpreting the story. To me it sounds like AWS was doing everything fine (and OP agrees), but he wanted to re-negotiate the $1500/month fee because of his under usage (maybe a cheaper tier?), so he sent an email. They didn't respond, so he stopped paying to get their attention and entice them to respond. But, intead of responding, they just terminated his account.

I read it otherwise. This is the smoking gun, to me:

> So I stopped paying. Why keep paying charges I believe are wrong when the company won't discuss them?

That sounds to me like he thought they were mis-billing him, to the tune of $18K per year, not that they were billing him correctly but he wanted a better price.

From your post it's not clear that you understand how AWS charges. CloudWatch metrics would only validate your case if these were pay-per-use services like Lambdas or something. But you use the word "infrastructure" which implies you have allocated resources and simply don't use them. That's a valid charge.

Again maybe you are aware, but it wasn't clear from your post.

They 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.

Switch your domain to Cloudflare. Setup the DNS there for your e-mail.

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.

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.

Did you build in regions you don't even use and then forget about it?

silly AWS, google already went through this infinite loop of bot support. learn from their mistakes.

Either 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.

> AWS has a billing dashboard that exactly says where money goes

Only if you know how to dig to see anything more detailed then a vague product name like EC2

You’d think being charged 1,500 per month for “near zero usage” would motivate you to dig.

Even 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.

> 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

A couple of managed DB instances and a decently sized ec2 will do that.

What you say is missing crucial details, it simply doesn't add up. Near-zero for what? What was it for? Was it the classic "I deployed too many services and forgot to set up budgets" or was there something else?

I 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?

I swear, I am starting to feel like these complaints about how "obviously" something is AI written are the human equivalent of "you are absolutely right" -- it's like some kind of automatic response now

I don't know how to explain it, but I've interacted with LLMs for multiple years now, and especially a lot of time with the recent-ish frontier models, so I can detect most AI writing quite reliably. Sure, you might disagree, but I'm fairly certain this entire post is an LLM output.

its turtle bots all the way down

Next time use Hetzner.

Hmm funny to see Hetzner mentioned - I tried to rent a dedicated server from them and placed the order and gave payment details, about 6 hours later I got an email that they have decided to deactivate my account and cancel all products and orders because of "some concerns". Email support can't give me any reason because the info was anonymized and couldn't give me any information on how to avoid having my account randomly deleted besides don't break tos.