The other day while playing around with my AWS RDS account, I realized that I left an RDS-large instance running for about 6 months. It had nothing in it, but it was turned on. It was costing me about $500 a month, but I had no idea because I pay my amazon account automatically, and I rarely ever log in to check in on the bill.
This is of course a huge mistake on my part, and my heart sunk when I realized what a mess I made.
I did the only thing I could think of and emailed Amazon asking them to spare me. I made a huge mistake and needed their mercy.
To my surprise, they credited me the entire balance without hassle, within 2 days.
Awesome. Amazon is awesome.
And yes I learned my lesson. I now check my billing account regularly and set alarms to notify when I exceed my threshold.