How AWS Support Saved Me $530 (And Why You Should Check Your Quick Suite Settings Right Now)

#quick #q

Background

Forgot to turn off a promo feature. Got hit with $530 in charges. AWS Support waived it all. Here's the full story.

The Setup

From October 9, 2025 to January 31, 2026, I was heavily using Amazon Quick Suite Research during its promotional period. Amazon Quick Suite is an Agentic AI Teammate, a PhD-level researcher, a business analyst, and an automation expert in one workspace. The timing was perfect because I was preparing my AWS re:Invent presentation, and having access to custom datasets across AWS integrations made a huge difference with research quality. Being able to run evaluations against my own data helped me fine-tune everything before going on stage.

If you want to see what I was working on:

The Oops Moment

February rolls around. I forgot to turn off Admin Pro after the promotional period ended.

Suddenly there's an extra $500+ charge on my bill. The promotional waiver for the Amazon Q in QuickSight infrastructure fee ($250/month) had ended on January 31, 2026. Plus there were Reader Capacity Pack charges I wasn't expecting.

Here's the thing about Quick Suite pricing that caught me off guard: during the promo period, Admin Pro was only $40/month. But once the promotional period ends, you're also on the hook for the mandatory Amazon Q in QuickSight fee. That's a significant jump (++ $250/month extra with Admin Pro user) if you're not paying attention.

AWS Support Came Through

I reached out to AWS support. Keep in mind I'm on the free Basic support plan. No Business Support+ or Enterprise plan, no dedicated account manager, nothing fancy.

They credited me the full $530:

$500 for the QuickSight capacity reader pack and Amazon Q charges
$30 for additional user charges from January (accidently activated)

I've worked with a lot of cloud providers. Getting charges waived when you're on a free support tier? That's a rare to find customer obsession these days. The fact that I got proactively alerted by AWS Budgets and CloudWatch alarms before the charges even hit my card made the whole conversation easier.

What Triggers the Amazon Q Fee

This is the part I wish I'd understood earlier. The $250/month fee kicks in when your account has ANY of these:

Pro users (Author Pro, Reader Pro, or Admin Pro)
Topics created
Dashboards with Q&A enabled

So even if you're not actively using the generative BI features, having a Pro user sitting there will trigger the charge.

How to Avoid This

If you want to keep Pro but stop the Q fee:

Go to QuickSight Console > Topics and delete any Q Topics
Check your dashboards and disable Q&A on each one
Save the dashboards

But here's the catch: if you keep Admin Pro, you'll still pay the $250/month Q enablement fee. The Q fee is bundled with Pro subscriptions. You can't separate them.

If you want to avoid the Q fee entirely:
Downgrade from Pro to a regular Reader or non-Pro user type. You lose the Pro authoring capabilities but you also lose the $250/month charge.

To cancel Reader Capacity Pack:

QuickSight Console > Profile icon > Manage QuickSight
Left nav > Manage Subscriptions
Find Reader Capacity Pack (500 sessions)
Click "Switch to user pricing"

Changes take effect the following month.

The Billing Pattern That Tripped Me Up

December 2025: No Q fee (promotional waiver active)
January 2026: No Q fee (promotional waiver still active)
February 2026: $67.34 Q fee (prorated, promo ended January 31)

If you enabled Pro users after October 9, 2025 (the Quick Suite launch date), your promotional period also ended January 31, 2026. Check your February bill.

Bottom Line

Amazon Quick Suite is genuinely powerful for AI evaluation and research work. The ability to use custom datasets across AWS integrations helped me prepare for re:Invent in ways I couldn't have done otherwise using either Perplexity Deep research or ChatGPT Deep research mode.

But watch your billing. Set up AWS Budgets alerts. Set up CloudWatch alarms. And if something goes wrong, reach out to support. Even on the Basic plan, they might surprise you.

Full opt-out instructions: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/quicksuite/latest/userguide/generative-bi-opt-out.html