Absolutely, they are not the same thing. Yes, S3 provides much better durability. I just can't afford it.

For my use-case I'm OK with un-hedged risk and dollars staying in my pocket.

I backup my nas to rsync.net, it’s very cost effective using borg backup.

$0.01/GB/mo, that does not seem better than Glacier, is it?

Except it’s not glacier speeds, there are no bandwidth costs, support is on a completely different level than aws (you can actually reach an actual knowledgeable human), and you can use anything that speaks ssh. They also have an expert price at 0.008$/gb/mo here https://www.rsync.net/products/borg.html

Yes and no. I have been using NAS for a long time, and I use older drives as offline/offsite backups. So the cost is mostly amortized already. Those machines are off except once a week (local)/ once a month (offsite), to do an incremental backup. So this is a good use of some older drives.

They probably factored RAID1 into that price, which you can skip if you're setting up three copies. (At least I hope they did, their hardware prices must be dire if $2000 only gets you a tiny NAS and two 10TB drives.) If I do napkin math based on US prices, a mini PC and a 20TB external drive are $500 total, so that's $1500 for the triple-NAS option and $3000/year for the S3 infrequent access option. Still extremely compelling.