Must be really nice people there which don't want any money. Really warms my heart.
ofc. When things go viral they say "yes". But i would really love to get some number how many students and hobbiests got a 1k-2k bill and just paid it for the problem to go away.
Amazon is a publicly traded company. If they wave fees every time something goes wrong, investors would tell them something.
AWS and all of the other cloud providers gives millions in credits each year for migrations and professional services for both their inside professional services department and third party vendors. The reputational risk for them to go after some poor student isn’t worth it to them. The same is true for Azure and GCP.
Have you read one even anecdotal case where AWS didn’t immediately give a refund to a student who made a mistake just by them asking?