This is simply untrue for bandwidth charges if you're pushing a lot of data.
A streaming video service, for example, might end up paying $0.10/user/hour. So a movie-a-night customer would cost $6. What multiple of reasonable do you think that is?
About 2-3x. I'm a big fan of cloud computing in general (and AWS in particular as the clear leader, IMO) and helped lead our transition out of colos and into AWS, but the egress charges is the biggest area of AWS that I feel is egregiously over-priced.
Fortunately, it's relatively easy to locate some of your very high egress services outside of AWS. I discourage that for casual optimization, but when you get to Netflix/20 scale, that makes sense to trifle with.
“The best way to express it is that everything you see on Netflix up until the play button is on AWS, the actual video is delivered through our CDN,” Netflix spokesperson Joris Evers said.[1]
The fact here isn't quite right. (I'm an employee at Dropbox)
Primarily, until 2 years ago we did lean on S3 for all block storage, but most of the rest of the infrastructure (metadata storage, etc) ran in our own datacenters.
Your point I think you're getting at sounds like something I'd agree with though -- you can wait a bit the cost efficiency starts to be what is important/impactful to work on before shifting your usage away from some of these providers.
A streaming video service, for example, might end up paying $0.10/user/hour. So a movie-a-night customer would cost $6. What multiple of reasonable do you think that is?