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Is there a way to use AWS without a credit card? #61

Closed m8pple closed 5 years ago

m8pple commented 7 years ago

I am currently in the process of signing up for Amazon AWS and it is asking for my payment details. I don’t feel comfortable providing my personal payment details – is there a college provided card/account or something that would allow me to use AWS without providing my personal payment information?

m8pple commented 7 years ago

Update from the student involved:

It turns out that it is possible as an IC student to sign up via the "AWS Educate" program that does not require payment details.

This actually runs counter to my previous experience - it's possible they changed things when we became an official university partner.

I'm afraid not, the only route I'm aware of is for students to sign up individually, and they require a credit card to do that. As I understand it, they want it as a way to prove there is someone on the end of the account, and for some kind of audibility (e.g. to stop people hosting servers with illegal material) or fraud prevention (e.g. in case someone spins up 100 GPU instances, then doesn't pay). I believe Azure and Google also do the same for their services as well, so even for the free tier's you need to have a credit card.

When using college services you're covered by ICT policies, so if students do anything illegal or that otherwise contravenes policies then we have the ability to kick them out (and do...). But as a commercial service, the only fallback they have is financial...

So far I don't think any student has lost money using AWS, so that's about 300 students over the years. Once or twice people have left instances running and incurred a hundred dollars of expense, but Amazon are pretty good about refunding when it is obviously error.

That said, there doesn't have to be any money on the end of the credit card, so there do appear to be ways of using throwaway cards on AWS (though I've never tried it):

http://blog.akansh.com/2015/06/how-to-use-aws-services-without-credit.html

m8pple commented 5 years ago

The AWS Education Starter kit doesn't allow students to use GPU instances, so it can be useful for dev, but you still need a full account at some point.