Yup. Got charged over $800 for "experimenting" with a DynamoDB database and forgetting to delete it afterwards.
Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time".
DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt.
Apparently I owe AWS 1 cent for DNS. The problem is I can't login to pay it, so every month I get a email that says "your aws account is going to be suspended" and 30 days later I'm disappointed that they didn't follow through with the threat.
AWS charges me $1 or $2 every month, and I log into my account and click through every page and can't find a single active service or any clue on what it's for. It's marked "EC2 - Other", whatever the f that means
So an elastic IP is just an AWS provided IP that they hand over to you... it's free while your instance is running but if you stop your instance, you get a small bill (it's like $0.84 a month)
I don't have any elastic IPs. The only thing under EC2 is a security group that it won't let me delete, but seems like no resources. My bill this month is $2.88 /shrug
What does the bill details screen show? I manage an AWS bill and I find it overly detailed. Others mentioned leftover EIPs, but the bill shows these as their own line item.
Not saying it can't happen, but I've never seen an 'Other' listed on the bill details screen. As I said above, it's detailed to a fault.
Actually it looks like this is for an EBS snapshot. Now it seems like EBS is a Lightsail feature, and the Lightsail console says that I don't have any storage or snapshots? Hm
EBS is also the general external storage attached to an instance. Go the ec2 console and look at snapshots and you should see it there. They are region specific, so make sure to select the region referred to on the bill.
I haven't used Lightsail, so I'm not sure if those snapshots end up in the general ec2 console. But, if you already checked the LS console and didn't see anything, then they must be in the ec2 console.
I keep a penny on my desk at work. Every time a coworker comes across somebody's account that is off by a penny, I offer it. They think I'm being funny, but the point I'm trying to make is that it wastes more than pennies worth of our time to spend it worrying about a few cents.
I've seen people mail in checks worth less than the stamp it took to send them. It's a wild world out there.
The interesting thing is, accounts being off by a penny or two (excluding actions such as customers doing a mis-type in the bank transfer) can actually point to deeper issues such as improper rounding somewhere in the path.
Usually they wrote us a check for the wrong amount at some point and end up with a small balance remaining in their account. We don't want to just forgive and forget every time somebody owes us $0.16, but if it's been there months and it's going to take extra effort to get it from them, it's probably not worth it.
We do try to determine where the discrepancy started and watch for indicators of a bigger issue.
They do this to me too every month, as the card on my AWS has expired, and they complain and complain and complain before finally charging the card on my Audible account. Definitely need to get around to separating those.
> DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there.
Did you look at the PDF invoice in the Billing section? I have never seen an invoice where the line items didn't add up to the amount charged to my credit card. If there's just $2.40 on there with no explanation, I'd open a support ticket to complain.
(While looking into this, I was surprised at how minimal DO invoices are, however. For GCP, I'm used to seeing on the order of a million line items per month. Seeing only 3 on my DO invoice was surprising, and could definitely lead to a case where something isn't accounted for correctly. But, I bet support will fix it up for you.)
> DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt.
Oh I used to get this, for me it was snapshots of a VPS I destroyed. Completely my fault, but yeah it was annoying to figure out at the time. Probably worth checking you don't have any reserved IPs, disk backups or snapshots left over
Honestly I get lost inside of AWS. Only recently was I able to figure out why I was getting charged $.82/month which, in the long run, is really nothing. But it's amazing how hard it was to figure out why I was getting charged for something that I originally thought was just going to be free.
I used the AWS free plan many many years ago as a student. I was so paranoid about losing money that I immediately shut what I was using down after I thought I didn't need it any more (even though leaving it on was part of the free plan). I turned off the instance, but I forgot the public IP. A month later I got charted a few pennies because an associated public IP is part of the free plan, but an un-associated one isn't.
I didn't go bankrupt, but it proved to me how scummy AWS can be given that actually trying to use less is what got me charged.
I have a DO server thats been running for more rhan 5 years. It was the basic $5 bucks instance they offered at the time I felt a bit robbed a couple of days ago when I was spinning another instance and I saw that the newer $5 instance has more memory and more cpu power. I feel like they should have decreases the cost of the older less performant instance.
I have been spoiled by my Internet provider who year after year they will automatically increase my speed as they made it cheaper, as I paid the same amount for the service.
When they changed the pricing they emailed me and told me that I could effectively reprovision my machine to get the price difference, I think it was part of a rollout of some other infra as well.
The billing statements I see in DO under Billing (sidebar) > Billing history seem pretty verbose to me. If it's not there I would recommend reaching out to their support.
Yeah but it shows they are reasonable and flexible if a customer makes a mistake. The reason Google Cloud is third, people remember how they were treated when they used Google for Work or whatever its called now.
> But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time".
Is better then if they said: "We reminded you about the consequences of not deleting, we have done nothing wrong."
>DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt.
I would not go that far to say it's fraud. Calm down.
Maybe it's something I missed. Maybe its some hidden feature that I did not turn off. But I deleted all my droplets, all my IP's all my firewalls, etc, etc and could not find anything else.
You have in good faith attempted diligently to have a zero purchase. You cannot even find any purchases. In that case they have reached into your pocket and taken money without your consent. That is just a fact. By mistake? It's being short changed in a shop at the absolute best.
This is not a mistake any company should be able to afford to make. Ever. Under any circumstances. If it really is "just an error" they need to making amends in a very public and obvious way that is clearly expensive to them to show good faith.
But we don't get that. We have to fight from a position of being in the wrong when we have money taken from us by these fraudulent practices to overturn them.
It is necessary to go HARD at the morality of "accidental theft" because it is so prevalent and because all these companies clearly don't consider it a detriment to their reputation.
You've been diligent. When does it become their responsibility to not reach into your pocket when you clearly don't want that. Or anyone's pocket. I'd bet quite a sum that where there is one there is many.
This is where I'd say that every single paid service needs to have a way to contact a human being, and any cancellations expressed to that person by an authenticated user must be respected. If services are allowed to construct Gordian knots of byzantine interacting services, then there must be a way to cut through that mess.
I'd double check that you don't have multiple orgs. You used to share a cess to your account with people, then they made some org change a while back that essentially moved that shared access setup to an org and gave you a new personal account iirc. Easy to not realize you have both.
Sure, I called customer support and they reversed the charges. But something the nice lady on the other end said as she chuckled: "This happens all the time".
DigitalOcean is the worst with the dormant accounts. Just got dinged around $2.40 on my credit card. Going into DO I could not find what was causing that charge. There was nothing there. Wuuuttttt.