[julianeon]

For people who don't pay too much attention to storage: AWS S3 is a technical wonder, bringing down the price of storage to practically unbeatable levels. It's really a jewel in the crown of the AWS service portfolio. In terms of the amount you get metered down to the penny, it may be the single most impressive thing on AWS, honestly.

If it costs me $1 to store my stuff per month on S3, and you reduce that... so what? It's so cheap it's not going to help my wallet much. This isn't like going from $100 to $2- or even $50 to $20. It's going from like $10/year to... I dunno, $4. I might as well stay on AWS.

That leaves the enterprise market, which, naturally, loves S3 100x more than the random individual, because S3 is a solid enterprise choice, and will always have the enterprise advantage, by a crushing margin.

AWS is itself hard to compete with, but of all the services you could compete with on AWS, S3 is probably the worst. So you're going up against the worst of the worst, here. I can't say it's impossible, but it's like an extra double hard market to compete in, in an already tough market.

[qot]

You may be able to store 1 TB in S3 deep glacier for $1 per month, but it will cost you $90 in bandwidth to do a restore.

I recently had a RAID array rebuild fail and had to restore 10 TB from cloud backups. That would've cost me $900 on S3.