My biggest gripe with snapshots is there is no actual way to see how much each snapshot consumes in S3. There is no Cloudwatch metric or any other way to see per snapshot or even per volume.
Sure, there is a billing per region but that's just not granular enough.
And we had snapshots for how many years?
As for the price, when did it more than tripled? I don't remember any blog or tweet or any other announcement. Anybody got a link?
The lack of visibility into per-snapshot cost is insane. We had a problem with the old deduplication process that meant that identically timed snapshots for identical servers with identical data could sometimes cost more than 2x the others. We only found this because we happened to have more the expensive volumes in one region than the others, so our snapshot bill was mysteriously $10k/month higher in that region.
We have essentially no idea how much many of our backups actually cost.
The price didn't triple, what happened was they dropped S3 pricing substantially but never dropped snapshot pricing, even though it's based on S3.
This, combined with the dearth of reasonably priced instances with large on-instance storage, artificially inflates our bills to the point that we're seriously considering abandoning AWS. just EBS snapshots are a full percent of our revenue.