[devit]

As usual, the pricing is not very friendly, and apparently designed to lock your data into AWS or exploit your weak negotiating position once you buy in.

While you can send in 50TB for $200, taking the same 50TB out costs an additional $1500 charge (50000 * 0.03).

[assuming they are not transferring the data over the Internet, the cost to AWS should be the same or cheaper for reading]

[desdiv]

$1700 is amazingly cheap when you consider that it costs $4300 [0] to transfer that same 50TB out of EC2.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

$4300 = 10000 * $0.09 + 40000 * $0.085

[devit]

... which is also wildly overpriced.

According to multiple sources, Internet transit in the US now costs less than 1$ for a 1 Mbps line for large deals, which translates to 1$ for 324GB, which translates to 0.003$ / GB.

Amazon charges 15-30 times that.

(it appears that traffic can be much more expensive in places other than the US and presumably Europe)

[utrex]

It may cost that much to buy that capacity, but it costs a lot more than that to run the large scale organizations (CAPEX/OPEX) that build and buy these services. You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.

[kobayashi]

Exactly, I don't know why so many people seem to miss this. The charges may not reflect the cost of that particular service, but if one looks to the service as a whole, it's not that badly priced. Costs cover the infrastructure, which we reasonably expect to contain multiple redundancies, as well as a profit margin for the business.

[johansch]

> You're not just paying for a pipe, you're paying for the corporation.

You are paying their profit margin, yeah.

It is wildly overpriced, no matter how you look at it. Operating costs even when done on a much smaller and more inefficient scale than for AWS do not make the total cost for incremental bandwidth usage THAT much larger.

[cortesoft]

Are there any alternatives for the service that are cheaper, with the same reliability?

[chrismarlow9]

Don't bother, AWS defenders will continue to defend it and replace employees with a larger AWS bill and further lockin until they shoot themselves in the foot.

[jonknee]

A large AWS bill (which actually gets cheaper over time!) is much easier/cheaper to get rid of than employees. AWS also won't get recruited by a competitor and come into your office wanting a ton more money.

[azinman2]

What's the alternative?

[faizshah]

Centurylink has a pretty formidable IaaS offering, it's very well priced and they charge very little (comparatively) for bandwidth. The only problem is their storage solution is extremely expensive but using S3 or soon Backblaze B2 as a storage layer is good enough for me.

[kordless]

The Intercloud.

[guimarin]

You're right, AWS just breaks even with their pricing.

[vacri]

> charges 15-30 times that.

I think you're going to be absolutely furious when you find out what the component costs of a bottle of any random drink is.

[Spooky23]

A few years ago, an enterprise network I helped run with about 40k users at several hundred locations cost something like $30-35 per user/month to operate. We had strong incentives to price below what an MSP would charge and beat them on 2 occasions.

About 40-50% of that cost was circuits and transit. The vast majority was tied up in labor and equipment costs. If I making money on the whole stack with the market control that AWS has, I would want at least 60% margins on the business -- it's not like locked in customers have easy options.

[Retric]

1 Mbps * 2 days = 21.6 gigabytes so sure you could transfer a lot of really stale data, but if latency is important the prices are dramatically higher. You also often end up paying for both the upload and download side if your need to regularly do large transfers.

[miraswitch]

My startup is working on this problem. We are working on an IaaS cloud designed for high-bandwidth users, with much lower pricing than amazon.

[rgbrenner]

Careful. My previous startup was a storage company that competed with Amazon and Google when they were charging 0.10/gb and I calculated it should be around 0.02/gb. A few months after launch, they both realized it too and dropped their prices. Leads dried up overnight.

The high prices seem to persist until one day they don't.

[miraswitch]

Yea, we considered this - but if Amazon and Google compete with us I'll consider it a personal success :)

[rgbrenner]

They compete against you whether they know you exist or not because your customers/prospects know Amazon/Google/etc exists.

It only takes one of the large players to break the pricing stalemate, and overnight they'll all follow to keep their position in the market.

[dexterdog]

I live and love AWS but I never understood why they don't tier bandwidth charges per costumer.

[hsod]

what does "overpriced" mean in this context? "overpriced" compared to what? is there another company offering a similar service for a lower price?

[devit]

Compared to marginal cost.

There are companies offering prices much more similar to cost, for example:

- Hetzner.de servers/colocation offers additional traffic at 1.39 EUR/TB = 0.00158 $/GB

- DigitalOcean offers 1TB traffic with $5/month instances = 0.005 $/GB

[gtremper]

The price of something is determined by how much people are willing to pay for it, not the marginal cost. We don't pay people based on the marginal cost to keep them alive.

[kuschku]

Actually, in many jobs, we do. That’s why several countries have defined a minimum wage, and why so many people in society work minimum-wage jobs.

[utrex]

teraflop was right, it's $200 per snowball device job, which is currently limited to 50TB. Maybe that will change. You can order multiple jobs to import more data. You have 10 days to complete the transfer and ship it back and then it's $15 a day. $200 buys you 50TB per job, great encryption, and speedy migration. Sources: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-importexport-snowball-t... and https://aws.amazon.com/importexport/pricing/

[teraflop]

After reading those pages, I think you're wrong, and the $200 is actually per-device.

For one thing, the documentation says you can use multiple Snowball devices, but carefully tiptoes around saying whether or not there's an extra charge for doing so. All of the language that actually talks about pricing just says "the device", singular. For another thing, the screenshots of the "create a job" workflow are missing any way to specify that you want multiple devices. It sure looks like one job == one device.

(This reminds me of the pricing issues around AWS's Glacier service. It's not even that the pricing model itself is bad -- it's that the marketing is obfuscatory to the point of being arguably deceptive.)

[jeffbarr]

You can request multiple devices at once. I didn't include that screen in the blog post.

[teraflop]

Ah, good to know! I would edit my comment with a correction if the option was still available.

[utrex]

You are right. I think that the value add is that in addition to getting to use 50TB of storage you also get good encryption and usable software.

[jonknee]

Well if you sent it in you already have a copy. Don't delete it and you can save the $1500.

[kobayashi]

I think the idea is that if one needs to recall the data from AWS it's due to something like data loss

[jonknee]

If I lost 50TB of data and could fix it for $1500 I would consider myself the luckiest person on Earth.

[annnnd]

Well, second luckiest I guess? The luckiest one wouldn't lose 50TB of data in the first place. ;)

[x5n1]

Same service needs to run the other way for the same price. $200 to get all your data shipped to you on an appliance/hard drive.

[rstupek]

The service is called AWS Import/Export so it seems you probably can get them to export the data to a snowball for you to get your data.

[utrex]

Right, you can, but you pay for export at $0.03 per GB.

[soneca]

i.e. Snowball is the price model of AWS.

[Hello71]

plus $200 for the job