[ben509]

AWS is vast. I have no idea what their overall accounting for networking looks like. Even for the tiny service I worked on, it would be tough to guess at what are overall costs were. We actually had an internal bill each month for all the regular AWS services we used, but then there were a host of internal services we depended on.

That companies don't charge for specific things doesn't mean those things don't cost them anything. It just means they're trying to work out a pricing scheme that scales with customer usage and is broadly understandable. So "data egress" is really just a proxy for "how much stuff you're doing with the networking subsystems of AWS."

Same thing with EC2, there are a whole pile of costs that are summed up with "time you rented an instance."

[GordonS]

See a lower comment I made here; what I really want is a little transparency about pricing.

Of course there are is an internal cost of doing business, and peripheral infrastructure cost - but if I pay $100 for service "A" I reasonably expect that fee pays for service "A". Instead, egress bandwidth costs seem to be used to trick customers into thinking services are cheaper than they really are.