For a business that makes checks notes 50 bucks a month in revenue with DO? If this were the case, prices would be astronomically high because there would be tons of scammers and bad actors abusing this system, leaving their servers running for months, because apparently DO has to send them a letter via snail mail to Antarctica and wait for their response. All of this would then have to be paid for by legitimate customers as for DO to break even, which means a simple droplet would probably cost around $50 alone. So no, thank you.

For larger businesses with thousands of dollars of revenue per month? Sure. For small $50 charges? No way.

That’s exactly how it works for providers in Germany… as a foreigner I find it hilarious. You do get back-charged on the extra costs, tho.

Why's it hilarious? If you stopped paying for something, how long should you get that thing for? What if you don't pay the back-charges?

I find it hilarious because I find it extremely dysfunctional .. for everyone involved and yet… it’s true. I can tell you from personal experience… my partner somehow signed up for a stupid accounting online tool that we never used .. and we just find out 2 years later because we received a letter from a debt collection agency asking for the 2 years we “owed” for a service we never actually used .. but they kept “providing” us. And somehow even tho we never paid .. they never stopped. We very likely had to pay a lot more than what we would have to if they had stopped providing the service at some point in the first place. So yeah.. it just baffles me to think this is how things are supposed to work in this country and neither the provider nor we could do anything about it.

Well, the service provider was ready to provide you with it. They kept your account, your data and ensured the service is available for you to use. Why should they care about whether you use the service or not? It's like renting an apartment, then never bothering to move in. Why should the landlord care whether you move in or not? After all, it's your responsibility to book services you use and cancel the ones you don't use. You made the contract, so you should pay for it. Nobody is forcing you to keep the contract beyond what's agreed upon, but you can't retroactively say "hey, by the way, I didn't live in that apartment for three years, can I please have my money back?"

I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. My original point was that in Germany they are mandated to keep the lights on until I explicitly cancel the service regardless of wether I pay on time or not. I didn’t complain about them charging me for something I didn’t use.. I just find it ridiculous that they had to keep providing me the service even tho I didn’t paid. I thibk from a provider perspective it’s shitty to keep on the lights while not getting paid. And I find it laughable that’s how service providers work in Germany .. it’s difficult for both providers and clients alike to cancel a contract in Germany.. And that’s even if the client doesn’t pay… and I think that makes everything worse for everyone.

Not getting something you didn't pay for is not dysfunctional. It's what turned slavery-based, Feudal and Socialist countries into modern ones.

Your example seems to be unrelated, although it sounds frustrating.

But.. that’s not what happened. I was getting something I didn’t paid for .. that’s what I find dysfunctional. Because that means there’s a lot of extra effort in the country on getting unpaid services paid. My personal experience just adds the cherry on top that I was also not using it. So it was wasted effort on the provider and society in general.

> I was getting something I didn’t paid for .. that’s what I find dysfunctional

Fair enough, but that's why I was saying your experience seemed to not be relevant to the topic.

Also, the more low level customer support workers you add to your cloud service, the more insecure it becomes, and typically the worse the support experience becomes (hiring people who actually have a good handle of how cloud software works ain’t cheap).

If you have an account manager or sales folk in the cloud org, IOW have a high spend, you get the twitter experience. If you don’t, and are a self-serve customer spending a pretty low amount like in this case and missed a payment and ignored the account emails reminding you to pay… what exactly is the provider supposed to do? I mean this in the nicest way possible but they aren’t so desperate for your business that they’re going to beat down your door so you can pay before you get shutdown. Important to keep in mind, if you don’t have a long payment history, you don’t look that different from a user that’s just trying to get something for free, and without paying for the communication channel, you also can resemble a company that just went bankrupt or something (which often creates a huge risk for the cloud provider if the cloud creds get sold by some disgruntled ex employee to crypto miners).

Source: I worked in this area at a major public cloud provider

"For small $50 charges? No way."

Why not? If the phone companies here can extend that courtesy to normal consumers then I find it ridiculous to suggest that a cloud provider couldn't afford to do the same.