Pricing means sifting through a legalese dense block of text to try to come up with even a way to estimate the costs. That is a problem. I should be given a rough cost expectation up front. Sure, it's not going to be exact and all, but This article is about a cost factor of *180.. That's the difference between an iPad and a Ferrari.
Other places of varying types of backup systems are a lot more clearer to tell how much I should be expected to pay. Or at least, I get within +/- 10%. Glacier? "Yeah, Don't worry about it till we bill ya!" That's the scam with all these cloud services really. Once we have your nuts in a vice, we can squeeze and extract, cause you don't have any other choice, now do you?
Before Feb 2017, it did work with the peak hourly request fees. Those were well documented. Apparently peak transfer rates were "confusing". I didn't think so, after all, that's similar to how I pay for internet access at home (I pay based on capacity, not based on bytes transferred).
> Cause you know, 60GB is realllly expensive to transfer :(
Network and disk IO capacity planning is hard. You can't just buy GBs of egress at $0.01 and then resell them at $0.01, because you're paying for maximum capacity and turning around and selling average usage. Similarly, when you have a bunch of data shoved into unused sections of disk, you can't just read them back out without affecting whatever else is reading from the same disk. If you want to sell something close to cost, you need to reflect the pricing structure of what you're paying to your customers.
So if you upload a bunch of data to a super-cold storage system that's even named after a geological formation that stays frozen for centuries, to remind you how cold it is, and then you make it hot by trying to download it all at once, you'd expect it to be more expensive.
Just do your regular cost-benefit analysis and it should be fine, based on how long you plan on storing the data and how likely or often you think you'll need to restore it.