Comment by rafram
1 year ago
Eh, I wouldn’t say that’s necessarily the case. AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months. That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything! It’s because they want to keep you as a customer even if it loses them a bit of money right now.
In the Netlify case, though, insisting that this person still pay 5% is downright insulting. I’m sure they’re taking a hit already - just waive the whole thing.
AWS support, for example, tends to be really good about waiving charges for things that are clearly your mistake, like an unused instance that you forgot to turn off for a couple months.
This is an admission that their UX sucks and makes it hard to know what state your account is in and what you're paying for. They waive the fees because a few high profile cases of people paying thousands due to the AWS console being awful would drive a lot of customers away.
I would say it is a scam, because you can't set a budget limit.
Stunning
Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv
Nowadays for customers spending millions of dollars you'd expect (at least, Amazon would expect) that the customer has a FinOps department who are already working on getting the most 'bang for their buck' out of what they're paying for and minimising their spend, and they would jump to another platform in a heartbeat if they thought they could save money. It's not unreasonable to think that you don't need to do these customers any favours to keep their business, because those customers are big enough to look after themselves.
For smaller customers, the friendliness of customer support and the flexibility to help them if they make mistakes is much more likely to be a retention consideration. And who knows when a company spending 3 digits a month becomes a customer spending 6 digits a month? You want to be the provider of choice in case the company grows.
AWS will save us so much money! We don't have to pay for people to look after hardware! ... just pay for people to set up AWS, and maintain AWS, and make sure we're not paying thousands extra for AWS...
Yeah, exactly. I’m talking “I got billed $15 for an instance I haven’t used for the last few months. Can you refund me?”, not “You guys mind writing off a million or two?”
You presumably already have enterprise pricing discounts agreed though?
Yes, but nothing novel, and this is a recent development (within the last few weeks).
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That’s not because hosting instances doesn’t actually cost Amazon anything
Except it doesn't cost them anything. The marginal cost of keeping your single instance running is $0 (unless they were 100% out of capacity and they could have sold that instance to someone else either at full price or spot price)
Electricity costs money
The electricity overhead of keeping an idle VM on an already running host is nearly zero though.
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But no electricity is used if your instance is up but idle.
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“There is a good chance it costs them $0” = “in expectation it costs them >$0”
This exactly.