> I have never heard of a case where they wouldn’t give refunds.

Really? Working in Southern California a few years ago, refund requests were refused ALL THE TIME. This is why there's a common belief that what you are charged you simply owe them, period.

It may be more progressive now, but let's not be revisionist.

We had spot instances with a mistakenly high bid that incurred thousands overnight when the prices spiked. No refund offered.

I know several other companies that had expensive mistakes without refunds. There's probably a complex decision tree for these issues and I doubt anyone really knows outside of AWS.

I think you have to think of it a bit more from Amazon's perspective. If you accidentally burn through your entire startup capital and shut down, they lose. If the risk of this sort of thing becomes well-known, then startups will start using other services rather than AWS, and the small fraction that grow big will be less likely to use AWS.

Being an entitled jerk who blames other people for your own negligence is bad, and you shouldn't change that. But openly giving companies the opportunity to be kind (while admitting that it was entirely your fault) potentially helps both them and you.