csakon

I agree that it should have been noticed earlier from a few vantage points. I'm managing over a dozen contractors which varies from dev to marketing to customer support, operations, sales, financials, investor relations, etc. Everything could be better, but it's a business and the squeaky wheel gets the oil. I never fathomed the squeaky wheel was going to be AWS usage charges.

I myself have never created an instance, I set up the account then gave access to the devs. I only log into the account to provide new access to devs that need it and none of them are full time.

Ultimately the responsibility lies with me, but I would disagree that my dev team is clueless. Rather they're working on development, not watching what the servers are doing on a daily basis so I think that's a bit unfair.

Footguns...lol. New term for me. I see your point and it makes sense from that perspective. For me as a small business owner, it's very painful considering I tried to go the normal route of opening a case for help and simply cannot get anyone to escalate this or talk to me on the phone.

I don't think i'm leaving anything out. It was my account (which now has had password changes and MFA set up), but I don't understand how there weren't red flags on the Austrian IP address login and the sudden spike in usage. I realize (now) that CloudWatch exists, but not sure why this isn't standard.

I was at fault for the double post of the support case, but that was a simple error on my part due to not thinking the first went through.

Once access was made, we were completely unaware of their existence until I saw the charges and asked our devs about it. They said they didn't have any knowledge or access to these new instances.

I appreciate the advice, will upgrade the support and try again.

Great advice, thank you.

Fantastic! You can always tweet at us @LanternCRM if you have prelim questions. We're also recently a CRM Idol semifinalist - http://www.crmidol.com/news/12/10/2014/and-2014-crm-idol-sem...

We integrate natively with GMail, IMAP, and Exchange Emails as well as Gcal and Exchange Calendars. We also natively sync with MailChimp and as of next week, Evernote.

Since we integrate with Zapier, we can do light push/pulls from their 300+ services which you can find here - https://zapier.com/zapbook/

Any business could use this. The core of the product is to help you build and nurture relationships with those you do business with.

You have your Contacts in Lantern, authenticate your email, calendar and obtain a Lantern phone number. From there, any communication whether email, calendar events, or phone calls are attached to that Contact. When another team member (or yourself in the future) looks at a Contact or Deals associated with that Contact, they will be able to refresh themselves on all communicate between that Contact and every person within your business.

Does this mean you don't consider 37signals a startup?

I would agree to no, they are not. They are a leader in their niche (simple small business products) and they are profitable beyond their original investment.

I can't recall how magazine publications refer to them (as a startup or a company based out of Chicago)