[Zahlmeister]

I don't know how using Sia works in practice, but comparing it with regular S3, which is connected to the entire AWS ecosystem (including EC2), is absurd.

Amazon S3 also offers "glacier" for longterm storage with few accesses, which is $4 per TB.

[panarky]

Costs for retrieval from Glacier are insanely complex and can be shockingly high.

It's best not to use Glacier as a price comparison because it's really misleading.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4412886

[dx034]

But that's the problem. S3 is cheap if you use it with other AWS services and it's designed to be only cheap that way. Bandwidth is expensive to avoid that people pick services from a combination of Azure/AWS/Google.

If you're just looking for storage, S3 is certainly not the cheapest provider. Glacier is a bit different but clearly just for archives.

[Zahlmeister]

I'm comparing just storage prices, because I have no idea how Sia works in terms of latency/bandwidth/access. Being distributed, I suppose it will fare worse in most (if not all) these respects compared to Azure/AWS/Google and maybe even glacier.

As for bandwidth cost: I don't believe Sia can be successful and stay that cheap. Why would providers of bandwidth for Sia be able to offer it magnitudes cheaper than the biggest tech companies in the world? Answer: It's offered by a bunch of individuals with no caps on their data plans. If Sia takes off and lots of people start using terabytes of bandwidth, the ISPs will put an end to it.