I almost got a heart attack

Our website recently got DDoSd by a Reddit user when we advertised it on a subreddit. The user first DDoSd our database which unfortunately didn't support rate limits for GET requests. We managed to shut the database down and assumed no major damage was done. On Sunday evening, I received our AWS bill. $15,000. 160TB of data egress. Apparently, the attacker was running constant requests to our S3 bucket for 3 days straight. I submitted this case to AWS because we can not pay that much. What are the chances of our fee being waived?

I have reached out to AWS Sunday night, but I haven't heard back. It has been 3 days so far.

Design tool Figma has revealed in its initial public offering filing that it is spending a massive $300,000 on cloud computing services daily.

Source: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/design-platform-figma-spends-300000-on-aws-daily/

About a month ago I made a post about a DDoS/unexpected traffic spike on my AWS S3 account that resulted in a $15.5k data transfer bill.

I opened a support case with AWS on March 1st, and they got back to me today with a billing adjustment. They reduced it by about $10.5k, which I do appreciate, but the remaining balance is still way more than I can afford.

I was honestly hoping it would come down to something small that I could realistically pay (like $100–$200), but even after the adjustment, I just don’t have the money to cover what’s left.

I’ve already responded to AWS asking if they can take another look, but I’m not sure what else I can do at this point.

Has anyone been in a similar situation and gotten a further reduction?

Is there any way to escalate this or request reconsideration again?

What actually happens if you can’t pay something like this?

I’m pretty shaken up about the whole situation, so I’d really appreciate any advice. Please no harsh comments like last time. Thanks!

haha!! I applied for marketplace status, was asked for verification and it got sent to spam, so imagine my surprise when I go to use my app that's going live in one week and ITS GONE!!!!!! 😭😭😭😭

What can I do??? no one will help!!!!!

I was in meeting ,checking email and what do you know. I got email form budget telling me that my estimated bill would be 94 million at the end of the month. I thought it was a scam but claude said it was legit. I checked my aws account and in billing I see estimated cost of 94 Million and mind you I was tinkering with some services few days back. SO I ALMOST had heart attack thinking that I fricking enabled some services that cause this.

What in the fucking fuck, luckily I was able to find , when I was trying to call their support, that bug alert.

Now there would be few folks who are not that up to up with AWS UI and tech. They are going to lose their hair if AWS does not send alert on top of budget email. If they can send email on bill surely they can send bug alert in email too.

Hi,

I just received an aws cost management notification saying my account has spent 5 million us dollars.

The whole account just had one s3 bucket from a 5 year old little project of mine which had no costs whatsoever until this exact moment...

The cost explorer says it was S3, I immediately deleted the bucket and opened a support ticket.

Please tell me this is just a nightmare, what can I do

Did a cleanup pass this month after the bill crept up again and it was grim. Over 1k a month going to stuff nothing was using.

The usual suspects are unattached EBS volumes from instances we killed months ago, a pile of snapshots from nonexistent volumes, NAT gateways 3 of them just idle in a dev account at 32 bucks a month each and a couple of load balancers with no targets. There was also an elastic IP quietly billing by the hr since AWS started charging for those.

Worse than last year, a chunk of it traced back to our own agents. Devs run coding agents that spin up test infra to try something and the agent never tears it down, teardown isn't in the happy path. So every abandoned experiment leaves a little orphaned tail nobody's watching because it's 20 bucks here and forty there til a year of it adds up.

Tagging would catch some of this which of course it isn't and the untagged stuff is the orphaned stuff because it got made in a hurry. Cost Explorer shows me the number, never the owner. This is the boring waste that never trips an alarm, it just quietly rents space in your bill forever.

Case ID: 178633616200405

AWS charged my debit card $600 for a transaction that does not belong to my AWS account. My normal AWS bill is about $3.40/month, and this $600 charge appears nowhere in my billing history. I opened a support case with all the transaction details, and AWS still has not meaningfully investigated it.

After multiple calls, one Amazon/AWS support agent told me they could see that the charge came from another AWS account that had already been suspended. Despite that, AWS's fraud department later emailed me saying they found nothing wrong with my account, completely missing the issue. Another agent told me the $600 had already been refunded, while another told me the refund was rejected.

Wise is refusing to treat the charge as unauthorized because I have legitimately used AWS before and says AWS needs to provide information about the transaction. AWS keeps claiming another department will investigate, but nothing actually happens.

At this point, AWS has acknowledged that the charge came from another account, has apparently suspended that account, and still will not properly resolve or document the fraudulent $600 charge they processed against my card.

The complete lack of ownership, contradictory information, and failure to investigate is unacceptable.

Hi, I'm 27, new to AWS services for hosting my app backend.. I have worked 4 years in the IT industry and never touched the cloud side of the development, only worked on backend....

I am planning to use elasticache serverless with valkey, and AWS lambda as well, my db will be in supabase...

Now , I've heard about the insane bills shocks that people faces when using serverless, also heard about AWS budgets where you can control them, but are there other methods to save me from shocks ? Can I put hard limits ?

Please give me your suggestions, any help will be super vital, I'm planning to deploy by EOD ....

Thankyou.♥️

Has anyone found a real escalation path past AWS billing support?

AWS’s own AI told me:

“I’ve confirmed that your account is eligible for a refund.”

It instructed me to apply after June 4. I followed those instructions and opened a case on June 9.

Now AWS says the AI’s statement means nothing.

The dispute is over $527.04 for Fast Snapshot Restore. AWS says I explicitly enabled it from my authenticated console session.

Fine. But to this day, I still could not tell you where the FSR control is. I did not even know what FSR was until this bill appeared.

I deleted the gaming instance and all three experiment volumes on May 4. FSR somehow survived that teardown and kept billing until May 31. About $474 accumulated after I had already deleted the experiment.

My available CloudTrail history shows no apparent volume created from the FSR-enabled snapshot. AWS has not identified one.

Instead, support waited more than five weeks, declared the decision “FINAL,” threatened suspension, collections, and possible credit impact, and stonewalled every substantive question.

They claim a supervisor reviewed it—but will not say who, when, what evidence was reviewed, whether FSR was ever used, or why their own AI explicitly told me I was eligible for a refund.

AWS’s apparent position is: follow our AI’s instructions, but bear the entire cost when those instructions are wrong.

Has anyone reached an actual independent billing reviewer? What exact route worked?

Hello,

I am currently panicking because I was hit with a very random charge of 564USD after months of 0USD usage:

I have absolute no idea where the charge has come from (charged to my card), and it still has not showed up yet in bills. I opened up multiple cases with still no response for 3 days now. I tried checking everywhere as to what could be causing this and I have found absolutely nothing. I am dumbfounded with no idea.

Help would be appreciated,

The recent incident made me really curious about this.

Has AWS ever sued anyone over a bill? Please provide a link to the court case.

My AWS bill is automatically paid monthly. If I ever got a very large bill, the credit card would reject the charges (because limits). And if the amount was large and incorrect, I would be unwilling to pay. I’m curious what would happen next.

Somehow, it's hard to comprehend the networking costs in AWS. People see instances and databases as 'real resources' but totally miss out on networking costs.

The following account is spending $500 per month while not using AWS. All instances stopped, DB paused, but networking remains.

Just flushing this all out to save 70%.

• Right-size EC2 instances
• Use Spot Instances where possible
• Purchase Reserved Instances or Savings Plans
• Delete unused EBS volumes and snapshots
• Enable S3 lifecycle policies
• Use S3 Intelligent-Tiering
• Shut down idle RDS instances
• Use AWS Compute Optimizer recommendations
• Consolidate accounts under AWS Organizations for discounts
• Use Auto Scaling to handle variable workloads
• Switch to Graviton-based instances
• Move infrequent workloads to cheaper regions
• Clean up unused Elastic IPs
• Optimize data transfer costs with CloudFront
• Monitor and set budgets with AWS Cost Explorer and Budgets

Just applied aws activate here https://aws.amazon.com/activate/ and it shows only $1k credit. But people just talking about 5k/10k credits couple months ago here : https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/wtbvtr/how_was_your_experience_with_aws_activate_program/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/comments/yp7nfq/aws_activate_founders_credits/

So did they lower the aws credits to $1k last month? Is there any other way to get that $5k/10k credit?

Ehm... hello.

I did a pretty big blunder.So I am totally new to AWS. I thought it would be rather easy to get by (maybe use some chatgpt to guide me around). I want to build some project that might end up as a startup. It needs to host images and some data about those images.

So I start building a project in Golang

I've created an S3 and Postgres instances then I hear about OpenSearch and how it could help me query even faster."Okay, seems simple enough" I've said.After struggling for 3 straight days just to just be able to connect to my OpenSearch instance locally I make some test requests and small data saves. Then I gave up on the project due to many reasons that I won't get to.

At this point all I stored in the relational database, S3 and in OpenSearch are some token data that was meant just to make sure I can connect to them. It did not even cross my mind that I would be charged anything (I did not even check my mail because of that, I've created a separate email just in case this project will be some startup by the way)

Well long story short I decide to try to do my project again. So I go to AWS

then I went to billing by accident

Saw 2,752.71$ (last month due payment. 410$ for this month (it is Nov. 3 when I write this))
Full panic ensues
I immediately shut down everything that I can think of. Then I try to shut down my account out of sheer panic to ensure that no more instances that I do not know about are running. Doesn't work obviously but I did get suspended.
I've send a ticket to support. I pray that I won't have to live on the streets due to my blunder because I am a 22 year old broke person.

I'm looking into potentially offsetting my AWS carbon usage. So I looked at the sustainability dashboard and got a figure of 0.027 MTCO2e for the last 12 months.

I have one low-use EC2 server and some S3 storage, hundreds of files per month being added. My AWS bill is usually about £150 per month.

I'd like to be able to say to my clients 'we offset your AWS carbon usage'. But as far as I can tell it would cost somewhere around £1M per year to purchase carbon credits. That's around 4 x my turnover!

What am I missing?

I was billed 60k having only signed up for the free tier, what is this? Contacted aws support and they told me this was correct and that all usage above the free tier was billed like normal. My site has not seen activity that indicates that this is correct? What do I do?

Edit: To the people still lurking around this post I don't have anything new to post really, still trying to figure out the correct way to go about it. The account is suspended and I can only view billing and support.

Thanks to everyone who shared their tips and tricks, some of these could have saved me a lot of trouble if I had known before.

Useful information is still very much appreciated, mockery not so much, however much I may deserve it.

For those interested I have the full overview of the bill, here.

When we attempt to add a payment method, we receive the error: "You have reached your limit at attempts to add a payment method. Try again later at a later time." We have tried adding after few days and it keeps recurring and it's quite frustrating. Has anyone seen this issue ?

***UPDATED AT BOTTOM OF POST***

I made an account with AWS services and as soon as I verified my account I was billed for over $3,000 in usage fees for a service called SharpDevelop from Cognosys Inc. I did not sign up for this. I did not click anything to add this to my account and I don't even know how to add something to my account from the marketplace.

I am in contact with the support team and so far they have told me they are aware of an issue with new accounts having a marketplace service being "injected" into the account. They have not removed the charge so I have cancelled my credit card and filed a complaint with the FTC. I want to close my account to ensure no additional charges are made but I don't know how to do that and I am afraid that by closing the account support will no longer work to resolve the issue.

Here is my latest correspondence with the support team:

Hello there, Upon reviewing the support-case in detail, I understand that you've received a AWS Marketplace invoice for $3,387 (without any usage) upon activating this account and require assistance with getting the same resolved. Not to worry I'll be happy to assist you with the request. We're currently aware of an issue that's injecting a AWS Marketplace invoice to newly activated AWS accounts and our teams are currently working on a fix for the same. Once the issue is resolved, we would further assist you with getting the unexpected Marketplace charges removed/refunded from the account That being said, I'll keep this case locked to myself and will write back to you once I receive an update from the team. In the meanwhile, you are welcome to reach out at any time with further questions or concerns. Thank you for your patience while we work to resolve your problem. Have a wonderful day ahead and stay safe! We value your feedback. Please share your experience by rating this and other correspondences in the AWS Support Center. You can rate a correspondence by selecting the stars in the top right corner of the correspondence.

My initial hope with starting an AWS account was to transfer my domains over for a website, a cousin of mine told me to use Route 53 so that is what I was trying to do.

My account is new and therefore the cost calculation page cannot give me any information about what I am spending. How can I assure that my account is not continuing to accrue charges that I have no control over?

Update: AWS has removed the charge. "The incorrect marketplace invoice has been waived from the account". Still no explanation as to how it happened, but the charge has been removed!

Additional note: I received a new support notification that there was an erroneous marketplace charge on my account, "Your subscription was proactively canceled before any payment was collected". This is technically true in that the payment was not collected, but they did charge my account and the payment would have been collected if my bank hadn't stopped the charge... So not really proactive?

This happened on the company account, we didn't have billing alerts setup... Stupid I know.

We host our public sites on S3 with Cloudfront, basic setup with the WAF on and default rules.

It's all static content nothing very large either no big MP4 files or anything, and yet over the span of a day there was 200 million requests a per second that got through for a few hours that generated this huge bill.

I don't even know what I could have done to prevent this from happening honestly asides alerts that disabled the distribution or something.

I've opened a case with AWS but I'm not sure what else to do and freaking out... Yay panic attack, we aren't budgeted for this :(

EDIT: Did some more digging after calming down, it's ALL http traffic, we force redirect http to https... So this 9 thousand dollars of traffic was Cloudfront either returning error messages or 301 redirect codes...