[xyzzy123]

That's an interesting observation! Definitely creates weird incentives.

It seems incentives also depend on the nitty gritty details around how you are billed which are not defined very clearly. Granularity and timing, whether you pay for part months of storage etc.

However all games aside it does seem like if your own egress were free (or much cheaper than 0.01) it would be most efficient to send your data directly to where it needed to go, yourself.

Then you'd only be paying $1 for the backup.