[jweather]

$69 is the upfront fee for a 1-year "light utilization", you pay hourly on top of that at $0.039/hour. Note this is half of the $0.080/hour normal price (non-reserved). If you wanted a dedicated (100% utilization) reserved small Linux instance, it would be $195 setup and $11.71/month (total $335/year) vs. non-reserved at $58.56/month (total $702.72/year). Note that the upfront fee is paid each time you renew a term, it's not really a "one-time" fee like with dedicated servers.

Edit: source: http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html