Your credentials have arrived. The instinct is to log in and start building immediately, because that is why you bought the thing. Resist it for fifteen minutes — because what you do now decides whether the account is still yours next month.
Minute 1: Change the password
Immediately, before anything else, and store the new one in a password manager rather than a text file or a Slack message to yourself. The password you were sent has existed in an email inbox. Treat it as compromised, because functionally it is.
Minute 3: Enable multi-factor authentication
On the root user, before you deploy anything. This is the single highest-value action available to you and it takes ninety seconds. An account with MFA on root survives a credential leak. One without it does not.
Minute 6: Stop using root
Create a proper working user (an IAM user on AWS, an equivalent elsewhere) and use that for daily work. Operating as root every day is a habit that ends badly, eventually, for everyone who does it.
Minute 10: Check the billing settings
Find out exactly what payment method is attached, whether it works, and what happens when it fails or when a credit balance runs out. Failed billing is the most common cause of suspension, and on a bought account the warning email may go somewhere you cannot see.
Then set a billing alarm — a real one that emails you, not a budget report you will never open.
Minute 13: Confirm the region
Check that the account is configured in the region you asked for, and that the quota you paid for actually exists there. Quotas are granted per region, and discovering this after you have deployed is a genuinely bad afternoon.
Minute 15: Deploy
Now you can build.
Why no seller tells you this
Because none of it benefits them. A customer whose account dies comes back and buys another one. Telling you how to keep the first one alive is, in the short term, commercially irrational.
It is also the only version of this business that survives contact with reality. We would rather you never needed the replacement guarantee — and if you do, it is free and it has no expiry. Here is what actually kills accounts, if you want the fuller picture.
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