It might be cheap now but there is absolutely no guarantee that one day they'll send out a fairly nondescriptive AGB update email and increase the prices without you knowing. Then because all these ever so helpful cloud services don't allow you to create payment caps the costs can explode any day. It's all one executive decision away.

Historically speaking, in the ~15 years AWS has been around, have they ever increased prices for any service? In my experience, they've only ever decreased prices of their services as advances in tech have been made rather than increasing them. Sure some start out being expensive cough Macie and Fargate cough but they didn't increase prices after being launched as far as I'm aware.

Assuming they never have increased a price in 15 years, that doesn't prevent them from doing so, but it's a confidence inspiring track record.

I have about as much confidence that AWS won't raise prices on existing services/features as I do that Google will eventually kill another good project - https://killedbygoogle.com/

The fact that they don't have a simple price cap setting proves to me that they have no intention of being on my side. Promises of businesses that they won't increase prices are .. well, it just means almost nothing to me. It's "nice".

I feel like AWS has a pretty good track record at this point for not increasing prices - certainly to the point that I trust them not to pull an Oracle. (Hypothetically, my volume of data stored with them is low enough that even a 10x gouge would just make me angry, not wound me financially. There's not a mechanism for these archives to incur explosive costs, but your point is why I avoid other less-predictable cloud services.)

Don’t be silly. It’s a game theoretic certainty that they will indeed pull an Oracle.

There's no need to act condescending or call people names ("silly"). A 15 year track record and a public commitment aren't things you can hand wave away.

I'd also point out there's no substance behind your "game theoretic" jargon.

The parent put it too strongly but it's equally naive to assume that track records and public commitments mean anything to a privately-held company, with a commitment to profit shareholders, run by Jeff Bezos.

I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out.

Of course AWS needs to make money.

Of course they make more money in the short term if they raise prices.

Of course this affects their long term revenue and profitability because customers are afraid that prices of any of the products they use could rise.

Say whatever you want about Amazon, but they have never been a company that cares about the short term. They care about profits for the next 20 years, not Q3 2022.

You’re calling me/my views naive? Seriously? Just after I excoriated someone for name calling?

Out of curiosity, what do you think a fair price for s3 would be?

I haven't had a problem with the storage prices, just egress fees can add up

(I don't work for aws or a cloud provider, just curious)

A competitor of AWS claimed that AWS' egress fees are excessive and by how much - https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/

As for a fair price, I think Cloudflare and BackBlaze provide S3 API compatible services with better pricing. Cloudflare doesn't charge for egress at all. This lends substance to their claim that AWS is overcharging for egress.

Egress fees on AWS are high, but I'm not sure free from Cloudflare is the best evidence given they still haven't had a profitable year (getting close though in recent quarters).

To be clear, I have no special insight into underlying S3 costs. Only the perspective of a customer.

My opinion is that Backblaze has done an awesome job of driving their storage costs down, scaling that up, and then reflecting that thriftiness in their pricing. Their technical communication (e.g. hard drive reliability reports, software engineering blogs) makes me believe in their competence. So when Backblaze sets a price, I expect that's pretty close to the minimum sustainable price, because they've spent a lot of effort on that.

B2 currently charges $5/TB/mo with lots of options for bandwidth that's too cheap to meter. This strikes me as pretty fair overall.

B2 is definitely a lower tier of storage and I don't begrudge amazon wanting $23 for their top tier.

But the bandwidth is a huge issue.

In what sense? The durability is 11 9s either way [1]. If you value all the different AWS regions, then it's true that B2 can't match that. I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though.

[1]: https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/218485257-B2-Re...

The data is only stored in one data center, and the 99.9 and 99.99 percentile latency on requests is not good and can cause issues depending on use case.

And if durability is your main concern you'd be on a cheaper S3 plan anyway.

> I'd still argue the 4.6x cost difference isn't worth that for a lot of uses, though.

Sure. S3 and B2 have different strengths, and B2 is better for many uses. But looking at the full stack and the performance at each layer suggests to me that S3 charges a reasonable/fair price for storage. And that's what the question was about.

r2 is in public beta! it’s great.