[josevalerio]

Here’s a tweet from Corey Quinn describing how bonkers R2 pricing is:

> let’s remember that the internet is 1-to-many. If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13¢. With @awscloud S3 it’s $59,247.52.

https://x.com/quinnypig/status/1443076111651401731?s=46

[glenngillen]

I left AWS in 2019, so my knowledge on the current recommendations & pricing is dated. But even back then we were strongly discouraging usage like this for S3 for both security and cost reasons. Cloudfront should be in front of your bucket serving the objects, and IIRC it’ll be 75% cheaper in most cases. Still doesn’t bring it within even a couple of orders of magnitude of the R2 price, but this comparison does feel like it’s painting a best case versus a worst case. And the worst case being an approach that goes against best practice recommendations that are at least half a decade old at this point (I will concede people absolutely still do it though!).

[josevalerio]

Don’t those volume discounts kick in once you’re doing near 1PB? You’re still paying “normal” CloudFront prices all the way up and it also varies per region :$

https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/

[glenngillen]

There’s definitely volume discounts for CloudFront too. Or, there was. As I said my intimate knowledge here is years old.

[stingraycharles]

To be fair, 1 million downloads @ 1GB is a lot of data transfer. CloudFlare is likely losing money on this.

[pier25]

Why would they?

Cloudflare doesn't pay for egress and neither does AWS.

[stingraycharles]

But their egress capacity is limited, not? We're talking about 1PB per month here. If every customer of them would be paying only 13 cents a month and pushing out 1PB per month, wouldn't they need to significantly upgrade their hardware and lose money in the process?

[qaq]

They are already serving roughly 20% of internet traffic as is so there is some natural limit to this whole thing.

[eastdakota]

Yup. Bandwidth at scale is effectively free.

The greatest trick AWS ever pulled was convincing the world you needed to pay for bandwidth.

[55555]

Well you’ve won me over.

[weird-eye-issue]

"If every customer of them would be paying only 13 cents a month and pushing out 1PB per month, wouldn't they need to significantly upgrade their hardware and lose money in the process?"

Yes, but every customer would never do this, so what is your point?

You have to think more in terms of averages for things like this

[pier25]

> If every customer of them would be paying only 13 cents a month and pushing out 1PB per month...

Which is never going to happen for legitimate use cases.

And Cloudflare has DDOS protection for ilegitimate ones.

[12907835202]

I'm abusing the hell out of it right now offering GB+ downloads that I used to use Digital Ocean Spaces for. It's saving me $2000-3000 a month since the switch.

Maybe abuse isn't the right word but definitely making the most.

I am a bit scared about being turned off overnight though.

[eastdakota]

Not abuse. Thanks for being a customer. Bandwidth at scale is effectively free.

[hnwizard]

Just for the sake of enlightening some people. Roughly $1000 per month buys you unlimited/unmetered 10GBe (10GBps) connectivity to your server/rack (do you know what this is?), from a tier-1 network provider.

This translates to roughly 1.2 gigabytes per second (every second of of the month), and 3240 terabytes of data per month - in or out, the choice is yours.

Things scale down as you buy more bandwidth, or commit to a longer contract.

Many would say that $1000 per month is literally "nothing" in terms of costs of service for most real businesses our there, and if you're a happy CSP user, you're probably paying a hell of a lot more than that per month for your infra.

[explain]

Same here. What's your bandwidth usage? 500TB/month here for less than $4, on track to be serving petabytes in next few months. Feels so abusive.

[YetAnotherNick]

Yes R2 is likely loosing money in this case. But network capacity and switches is not that expensive the way AWS is charging for it. For $60k/month or $720k/year, AWS is basically giving 3GB/s.

I feel R2 should charge something for transfer though, otherwise people could abuse it. Hetzner charges ~1.5% of AWS egress fees which I feel is right thing to do and likely profitable.

[Too]

One hour 4K Netflix episode would be around 1Gb magnitude and likely watched by even more than 1M ppl. Game downloads even bigger, often at several Gb, with similar amount of users.

Though not everyone is Netflix.

[inhumantsar]

Almost no one is

[hnwizard]

Netflix serves all of this data from their caches, very close to end users, paying probably nothing for said bandwidth.

[mt_]

Won't you have the same problem with R2, once your data is in that provider?

[stingraycharles]

No, because CloudFlare doesn’t charge for egress traffic.