[koolba]

> We are reducing the prices for EBS snapshots by 47% for all AWS Regions.

This is one of the reasons I love AWS. Sure things some may be priced higher than alternatives (cough bandwidth!!) but I don't recall prices ever rising. Once you build something sustainable, your marginal costs only go down over time.

[kyledrake]

I knew a guy that ran a Subway sandwich store. He told me that they make their profit margin on the soda.

At AWS, the bandwidth is the soda. They mark it up 18x over market rate. The more successful you are, the more you pay for it.

That's their business model. They trap you into "cheap prices", and then hit you over the head for the rest of your life with bandwidth costs. They know that it's too hard to leave, so you won't do it.

I can get bandwidth on the market for about $0.013-$0.005 cents per gigabyte. Think about that. That's how much more expensive these cloud services are on BW costs.

[deegles]

Couldn't you use something like AWS Direct Connect to reduce your bandwidth costs? It goes from $0.09/GB to $0.02/GB.

[kyledrake]

No. That only works for a small list of very specific datacenters, and only works for a connection to your own servers in datacenters. It doesn't give you the price you want for end-user bandwidth costs, forcing you to fork out an enormous amount of money if you're doing anything that's even remotely content rich.

[vgt]

Somewhat of a shameless plug (work at Google). While AWS has shown willingness to lower prices, they seem to have forfeited price leadership to Google Cloud.

Examples:

1. http://fortune.com/2016/01/08/google-amazon-cloud-price-war/

2. https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/09/google-cloud-platforms-pre...

3. Google's Sustained Use Discounts vs AWS RIs

[koolba]

> 3. Google's Sustained Use Discounts vs AWS RIs

Big +1 on that one.

Getting reserved instance correct always feels like a form of voodoo mathematics (I want to save money but what if we scale?!).

The old light/medium/heavy was odd enough but the new no/some/full upfront is a effectively usury. You're agreeing to pay the whole thing regardless of the up front amount so the other two options are effectively a high interest loan to buy the full upfront fee.

[phonon]

What competitor of theirs has raised prices over time?

[wmf]

VMware?

[insert pedantic "VMware doesn't compete with AWS" arguments here]

[koolba]

> What competitor of theirs has raised prices over time?

Sorry if that wasn't clear. I meant the initial prices for their competitors are less, not that the competitors raise their prices.

AWS may be more to start with but it's a known entity that can be factored into considering the feasibility of an idea. If X is feasible given current prices, it'll continue to be feasible and possibly more so when prices drop further.