I used to run an AWS consultancy, which is how I know. ;) More than once I had a customer go "well support won't help me, how can I get my data back?". And I had to tell them "well, support isn't just not helping you for kicks, you know?".

I am sorry, I might be missing something, but I call bullshit. How much does it cost for Amazon to store several bytes that make a key? 5 cents per decade?

“Yeah, so uhm, you hit zero, so we deleted all your keys in an irrecoverable way, sorry not sorry” — is not a circuit breaker. Make all services inaccessible to public and store the data safely until customer tops up their balance. That’s how VPSes have worked forever.

I don’t argue that “cheapo” clients are worth retaining for AWS, clearly they are not. But this kind of hypocrisy really triggers me.

Edit: a helpful person below suggested I misunderstood the parent, and I now I think I did.

AWS doesn't retain anything for you unless you tell them to, and when you tell them to delete something (as in the example relayed by the person you are replying to), they delete it as best as they are able. That's part of the value proposition: when you delete the thing, it goes away. Why would they start now for clients who want their bills to be in the tens of dollars (when if you really care you can do it yourself off of billing alerts[0])?

Going to be real: you aren't "triggered", which is actually a real thing out there that you demean with this usage of the term. You're just not the target market and you're salty that it's more complex than you think it is.

[0]: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/monitori...

I'm pretty sure they meant that the customer schedules it for deletion and then blames AWS when they can't access their encrypted data.

Oh, in this case I misunderstood what the parent meant, and I replied to a wrong interpretation of their words.

Thank you for the clarification.