Tell us, what's this product that you have that's so successful that it needs 4Bn messages/hr full time, that you can't put together $260/mo?

First of all you are replying to something i didn't write. Or maybe show me where i wrote that I HAVE product that can't put together $260/mo ?

It's not about 260$ it's about tens of thousands of dollars saved by companies i work with after migrating from AWS.

AWS is overpriced service for people that do not have time or resources to do things on their own and pay massive prices for that.

"AWS is overpriced service for people that do not have time or resources to do things on their own and pay massive prices for that."

Isn't that the point of AWS?

The time / resources cost to build (monitor and maintain..) your own infrastructure isn't zero.

Did these companies have spare teams lying around the place, such that no new hires were needed to make the transition? If not, then it's not so much of a saving at the current cost of dev / ops personnel, just now on a different balance sheet.

Yep. Aws is funny. You want to at do it first, then it doesnt make sense at e.g the 10k per month price point. So you do something else.

Then you come back when you have due diligence and compliance and availability requirements. And you see how much that is really costing you with the arrangements you have.

Finally if you're super successful, you could self host or otherwise. But "rack costs" (naively) trade off against people and auditors.

Summary: AWS is expensive, especially for bandwidth. Practically if your business requirements are not bandwidth intensive, it ends up being paradoxically cheaper than the alternatives if your business involves legal agreements and things like availability commitments to customers.

It's not really rocket science you know, to install elasticsearch/redis/cassandra/0MQ/puppet etc and scale it to hundreds of servers. You do not need to build your infrastructure from ground up, just go with dedicated servers or with colocation if you want your own hardware and you will save tons of money comparing to AWS.

Saying that you "have" was in this case more of a rhetorical choice than anything. I didn't really think you had such a successful product.

You didn't understand again what i wrote, i will let you live in your imaginary world of assumptions.

I did understand. Like I said it was a style choice. I could've just as well have said "What kind of project is that successful and can't scrap together $230/mo?" and avoided the "your project" reference altogether. Choice of style. Didn't think you'd get hung up over it.

It's not overpriced, you just don't understand the concept of maintenance, monitoring, doing updates ect ...

Although I generally disagree with the parent comment, I have to say that AWS actually IS overpriced. Just look at Cloud plattforms like OVH.com or even digitalocean.com, they charge almost nothing for the traffic, whereas it comes at a whopping 0.09$/GB at AWS. If you aren't dependant on specific AWS products like DynamoDB you will definitely find a much better deal elsewhere.

I understand it very well i am doing it from before the time AWS existed.

true, but Amazon's own messaging / pub sub services, e.g. SNS or SQS go for 50 cents/million or 2000 for four billion - not really a fair comparison of course as they do something quite different.

What you mean exactly with the compared alternative? Capable of the same throughput? In theory or with a real reproducible benchmark? And which type of throughput? What kind of messages?