[Mr_Ed]

Hi, author here!

Thanks for the correction on this -- I'll update the article with correct info. I'm not a Prime subscriber and the information on Prime benefits are completely intransparent.

And if I can't easily figure that out, it's unlikely that average consumer Joe will. The perceived value of each offering is the point here.

[pc86]

> intransparent

They're probably opaque, as well.

[matwood]

Cost opaqueness is Amazon's MO around services. AWS is a huge offender.

[joncrane]

I've found it relatively easy to price out AWS projects, especially using their Cost Calculator: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html

Between that and https://ec2instances.info/, I can figure out the vast majority of what I need to know about costs on AWS.

What are the gaps that you see?

[toomuchtodo]

Tell me what your ALB costs are going to be next month.

“You are charged for each hour or partial hour that an Application Load Balancer is running and the number of Load Balancer Capacity Units (LCU) used per hour.”

Go here and see how “LCUs” are computed: https://aws.amazon.com/elasticloadbalancing/pricing/

[sushisource]

If they were genuinely interested in making it easy you'd see pricing information every time you're spinning up a new EC2 instance / whatever other service, right there, without needing to go pull up the cost calculator. Have an instant "estimate my current bill" button, etc, etc.

[arbie]

To be fair, Azure is no less opaque.

[nemothekid]

If you spin up almost anything on GCP, you can see the monthly cost right there, with all the options you have selected.

A rather obvious gap is this one - How much will an i3.xlarge with an extra 2TiB of storage cost you per month on AWS?

[GarrisonPrime]

>The perceived value of each offering is the point here.

Ah yes. The creed of American media: The truth doesn't matter. All that matters is what the masses can be convinced to believe.

[bogomipz]

>"Ah yes. The creed of American media ..."

This statement regarding "perceived value" has nothing to do with "American media", "fake news" truth distorting or even politics.

It's baffling that you have chosen to stake such claims on the author.

Perceived value pricing is actually a marketing strategy. Its used in factoring pricing for everything from gym memberships, to luxury good and delivery services.

see: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/perceived-value.asp

[ealexhudson]

His point stands: irrespective of what the "facts" are here, if shoppers are doing an apples-to-oranges comparison and picking Amazon, then that's a problem for Spotify.