AWS offers you the opportunity to pay cloud bills before they’ve been issued
- Reference: 1624602726
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/06/25/aws_advanced_pay_wtf/
- Source link:
As the name implies, a facility called “Advanced Pay” will let you send money to Jeff Bezos before your bill for cloud services has been issued. “Once you add funds to Advance Pay, AWS will automatically use them to pay for your invoices when they become due for payment,” states AWS’s [1]announcement of the service.
Amazon’s product pages [2]explain that the service only operates in US dollars, and only applies to AWS’s own services — third-party software you buy from the AWS Marketplace is billed as usual.
[3]
The Register could not find an explanation for why anyone would send Amazon — which in 2020 had revenue of $386 billion — money in advance.
[4]
Your humble hack thinks the mere suggestion is decidedly at odds with AWS’s long insistence that only chumps sink capital into IT instead of treating it as an operational expense. AWS and other clouds make an exception for that reasoning when they offer deep discounts for things like reserved instances — but even those sometimes offer monthly billing.
[5]Amazon notices Apple, Google cutting app store commission rates, follows suit
[6]Amazon says it's all social media's fault for letting fake review schemes thrive
[7]Amazon to bring a full region to Israel, land of large government contracts
One thing AWS never wavers from asserting is that it only does stuff that customers deeply desire — so perhaps there are some users out there who want to deposit cash in the Bank of Bezos rather than have it in their own coffers.
If you’re one of them, feel free to [8]contact me and explain yourself.
Otherwise, we’re inclined to chalk this one up to Amazon’s corporate culture of paying tax or posting profits only when strictly necessary — and a desire to have customers’ finances follow into similarly odd arrangements. ®
Get our [9]Tech Resources
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/06/aws-now-allows-customers-to-pay-for-their-usage-in-advance-/
[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/awsaccountbilling/latest/aboutv2/billing-limits.html#limits-ap
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YNWpOh6N3ozAld7CYm9srgAAAEI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YNWpOh6N3ozAld7CYm9srgAAAEI&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/amazon_appstore_commission/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/17/amazon_fake_reviews/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/israel_gets_an_aws_region/
[8] mailto:simon.sharwood@sitpub.com
[9] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Why get in the way of relieving people of their money in advance?
An initial search found this interesting [1]thread going back a over a decade.
Ed: I like the follow-ups... being from the future, this just reminds me how little we matter to companies like Amazon even back in 2010 when we communicate through their forums.
There's more [2]here once I refined the search further.
Looks like a combo of people who have to pay per transaction fee(s) and people where its easier for them to authorize $1K for cloud services in one go versus $80 one month, $120 the next, $90 the following and so on and so forth but don't want to commit to their annual offerings.
It's the best of both worlds for Amazon, per second rates AND money up front.
[1] https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=51931
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=aws+Advance+Pay+site%3Aforums.aws.amazon.com\thread.jspa
Interesting...
One regular gripe AWS has been dealing with for years has been the fact that there's no foolproof way to stop sandbox/dev accounts from accidentally running up massive bills. I wonder/hope if this is the first step towards accounts where you don't have to attach a credit card, and when your balance hits zero, your services switch off and your costs stop rising...
Would mean they could potentially do away with the Free Tier, reduce the pricing of the lowest tier of each service to compensate, and credit new accounts with $200, or something like that.
Fingers crossed...
Re: Interesting...
I think the free tier is quite well structured, but yes please to a sandbox/capped account... not that I've had a painful experience recently, oh no, definitely not ;)
Re: Interesting...
If your devs use containers then there is a newish service called AWS Lightsail, which is a fixed monthly fee. Not using it, just passing on info.
Public Sector Budgets
In the UK Public Sector, if you don't spend all your budget by the end of the financial year it all gets taken back to the central Borg bank account. So departments like paying in advance for things (especially in March ) as you get to "keep" the money.
Advance Pay
Put money on your account, and have that used to pay for your server. In other words, the same functionalty every game server provider has been offering for more than a decade now.
Wow. AWS has finally rejoined 2010. Impressive.
Lightbulb moment!
Giga-corp remembers one of the few ways to rake in money without having to do anything first.
The year 2005 called but then it said "no signal"
This sounds like an old cellphone or cable Internet contract. You pay a ton of money in advance and then hope you get your product. If you don't get your product, the fine print will explain how that's exactly your fault and how you're now in debt for violation of the contract.