Comment by toomuchtodo
1 year ago
Our AWS TAM says they don’t do this anymore, and we spend tens of millions of dollars with them annually. n=1, ymmv
1 year ago
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).
Is it, though? We've been getting a lot of pushback for months, even for things that weren't really completely our fault (and were made worse by the horrible lag of cost explorer), or even for things that were aws bugs. Maybe now it's official policy, but definitely it's been hard to get refunds for a while now. They were throwing tens of thousands of dollars of credits at us to just play with new services a year and a half ago.
I wonder if you’ve hit some kind of internal limit. I don’t know if such things exist but I’ve noticed a pattern around how discounts and credits are allocated.
I do feel your pain though. Managing AWS costs can be a full time job itself.