[_urga]

"In the current world, they can keep prices for some products below costs but make their money with bandwidth and the other services people are forced to use to avoid egress traffic."

Which AWS products are loss leaders?

S3 storage pricing is not exactly cheap. Neither is EC2 instance pricing.

"Otherwise everyone would use S3 together with Google compute engine and Azure databases (let's assume they'd be cheapest). In this scenario all providers would lose out."

No, S3 would do well, GCE would do well, Azure would do well. Providers only lose out to the extent their products no longer compete on merit alone.

[dx034]

I can imagine that this is a good reason. Otherwise they could make bandwidth cheaper so that people who cannot move everything can at least move part of their applications.

I think the three providers are smart enough to know why they charge that much for bandwidth. And this is the only reason I could think of why all 3 of them charge that much. And I'm pretty sure that some products run at a loss, they do for nearly every company. But AWS won't tell us which ones.

It's reasonable to think that S3 is loss making or about breakeven on its own but recoups costs due to bandwidth charges.