[quest88]

Just a quick rebuttal to your second point:

Implementing flagging and deletion is easy-ish, the maintenance is hard.

There's maintenance for unit, integration, and web driver tests. Someone needs to be oncall when they fail or become flaky. Someone needs to keep them up to date as tools and infra are deprecated. What's the SLA and SLO? Someone will have to maintain that. Who responds to monitoring?

Regulatory changes require effort, tests need to be updated, legal needs to sign off, UX may need to be involved. Who will make sure the sites maintain regulatory requirements?

You're right that it may be better to partner with someone else for archiving.

[wikibob]

And yet Amazon Web Services manages to STILL support SimpleDB. Many years (nearly a decade?) after being deprecated.

This sounds like a money problem to me. The argument is that people have to do boring work.

Yes they do, and isn’t that what money is for?

[joshuamorton]

The effort required to maintain a single non-changing binary, while nonzero, is far, faaar less, than the ongoing effort required to maintain user facing tools with regulatory compliance issues.

[zwily]

Why do you say SimpleDB is a single binary?

[lizardmancan]

have someone else put the dump behind a paywall.