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Why would AWS refund 100Gbps on egress since the account actively used that bandwidth? AWS would not know if this is legitimate traffic, a (D)DoS or whatever...

At most I think you could negotiate CloudFront rates, but even then, the sob story would be if you had been DDoSed and got hit with this traffic and AWS failed to protect you from this attack. Actively creating the outbound traffic is something that I don't see how AWS would be sympathetic to providing any refunds.

AWS is known for refunding or partially refunding people if they accidentally rack up a huge bill in a short amount of time. They even reduce the bill in this case. (I do think reducing a bill in the tens of thousands to hundreds is unlikely though)
I mean if this story is to be believed, AWS reduced the bill from 6500 to 1800.

I think developers accidentally racking up unexpected thousands in costs on their first AWS project is a pretty common phenomenon that their support has standard rules for handling.

I do think the discount is believable, but we don't know the line items AWS applied a discount/removed charges.

The developer said the agent deployed multiple CloudFormation templates, I'd bet that AWS waived the charges for the unused resources - like EC2 instances that were idle most of the time, very high margin SKUs, etc.

Now, for 100 Gbps of egress (which didn't actually happen) - and this is grounded speculation - I don't think that AWS would give a discount that is greater than CloudFront rates.

100 Gbps is A LOT of data.