I suspect that AWS is 'losing money' on this in the same way that Apple are 'losing money' on their high Street retail shops.

Working at a place with AWS enterprise support by contrast, for the second occasion, I would suggest that many of the places paying $15kpm don't cost that to support.

Yeah. AWS is probably "losing" tens of dollars per month hosting my personal account. They've made a few million dollars in sales as a result. I've personally started several projects on top of AWS which spend that much now. That started with the free tier back when AWS was young.

Google has treated me so badly so many times now on my personal account (as well as on business accounts, for that matter) in so many different ways that they've, conversely, lost MANY million dollars in business sales. It's hard to even count; a lot of people ask me for advise on decisions, and whenever someone even thinks about using Google Cloud in a business setting....

This is not a hole I see Google getting out of, except by eventually shutting down the Google cloud. Too many people have had too many bad experiences, and reputations take a long time to recover.

And the failures just keep on piling up.

Google is great for personal use, but I think they're diversifying in all the wrong directions. They're not structured for success there.

And yet Google Cloud has some great features that AFAIK AWS still hasn't, presumably due to different priorities.

Like regional disks [1] or live migration of compute between hosts if problems are detected with the host.

1. https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks#repds

> live migration of compute between hosts

When would you ever want to rely on this? Seems to me like you should have two hosts in the first place.

Google has been relying on it for years. It's completely seamless and means you get even better reliability by insulating from the underlying hardware issues.

When you don't want to lose the requests already in progress, and to avoid the failover window

Looking at support as a cost kind of misses the point. Bugs are bugs, and your big-ticket customers might just drop you rather than helping you figure out what is wrong with your product. Ignoring paying customers (even small-time ones) prevents you from improving your product. If they took the time to reach out (and especially if they're paying $100/month for support) you really need to listen to them and try and figure out how you can fix the issue so it won't affect big-ticket customers.

The price starts to go up steeply once you hit the % of monthly spend.

I'd guess they don't get many resource intensive support queries from the < $10k a month customers (and at that level you probably don't get the A team support)

Another comment later identified this - I actually did get a weirdly A-team support response. That's what made me scratch my head because I was coming in the poor / cheap / don't know what they are doing door (and most support is crap user misconfig issues at least from my experience). I just wanted the thing noted somewhere in case others were hitting it, instead I got a way above standard support specific technical response and some suggestions.

The other poster indicated it is possible for stuff like this that you get bumped, even on the el cheapo plan, to someone actually on product team. While I'd hate to be on the product team having to answer these, it perhaps keeps folks aware of customer issues so they can at least improve docs for corner cases?