It's a very special kind of evil. They can always argue it's your fault, because you haven't read something, you misunderstood something. There are even stories circulating of people who lost their life savings by mistake but the AWS team charitably decided they will forgive them just this time, how nice of them!

Everybody knows it's complex to their advantage, they are not stupid - but they can always defend themselves using the flexibility card. I don't believe a class action would ever happen.

Yes, the “let’s hook up your credit card to the Internet” part of cloud computing still makes me nervous.

Use a prepaid credit card. Boom. Protected

Google doesn't allow prepaid cards last I checked. I tried to use a card from privacy.com and the Google form explicitly stated that you can't use prepaid cards.

You'll still owe the money, but it's unknown whether or not they'll come after you or report you to credit agencies (which they can do w/o SSN). I guess you could use a fake name and address, though.

Last time i checked AWS didn't accept prepaid cards. Even if they did, they could still after you if you live in the USA, and if the amount in question is significant, also in other countries.

privacy.com is great for this.

Except they are in the process of changing their bank that they work with, so that they can change the type of cards they issue, and you have until the end of December to change over all your old cards from the old format to the new one, which means changing the card numbers, too. This is a royal pain in the ass for those of us with hundreds of cards registered through them. If there was another service of this type that existed, I’d switch to them in a heartbeat. And I will no longer recommend them here.

I was actually successfully in reversing a $500 AWS bill. I had needed an Active Directory domain controller so I found one in the AWS marketplace and deployed it to an EC2 instance. Well guess what, the DC must have had some malicious start up scripts in it because it proceeded to download a few TBs of data from outside to the AWS EC2 instance which equaled nearly $500. I complained and AWS immediately reversed it without any need to escalate. This was on a personal AWS account so no relation to any large organization. Morale of the story, dont trust AWS marketplace images from sketchy sources.