In my 25 years of running production services, I honestly cannot think of one company I've worked for that would have accepted their function being stopped in the middle of the night.

AWS already has a recourse for incidents like these: refund the spend. That is far more reliable than trusting an organisation can tolerate an outage.

The difference is none of the little sideprojects I work on are worth $4k in a month, let alone in a day. Obviously most companies want to spend the cash, but they should want as many programmers using AWS for sideprojects as possible.

It was more the "big" part of the "big companies" statement I was disagreeing with, rather than the "companies" part.