[rushi_agrawal]

It is interesting to note that while S3 prices have more than halved, Glacier prices have remained the same during that period. Does this mean that extremely low margins is at play here?

Or is it that Amazon has no competitor here yet, good enough to push it to lower the prices?

[cperciva]

Could be either, but note that Amazon has a history of introducing new products at or below cost and then gaining a profit margin by keeping their prices fixed while their costs drop. A while back I heard that the fully loaded cost (to Amazon) of m1.small was $0.15/hour when EC2 launched, but they priced it at $0.10/hour because they knew their costs would drop and they wanted to win market share.

[pvg]

That history may actually be over as Google is aggressively undercutting them and they are scrambling to match pricing.

Glacier now costs the same as a Google drive, except drive has none of the restrictions. AWS on-demand prices have been cut so much they've actually left some of their prepaid discount prices ('reserved instances', in their parlance) higher than what they sell on demand.

[cperciva]

Glacier now costs the same as a Google drive, except drive has none of the restrictions

Only if your usage is exactly equal to the maximum usage from one of Google's pricing tiers.