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>The price of support comes in at at slightly less than the equivalent amount of S3 storage

That's absurd. I would be running to NetApp and Dell for competitive object storage quotes then. Haven't done pricing on either one recently but at least a few years ago they were roughly half the price of S3 all in (including hosting costs).





> half the price of S3

No one other than hobbyists is paying full price on AWS.


Maybe someone else somewhere is getting some unbelievably sweet deal but what I've seen from cloud discounting is more in the "single digit percentage" range than "2/3rds off" or something.

There are a ton of different discount options - large customers typically get between 50-60% discount based on committed spending, and AWS is pretty flexible around how that commit lands (they will allow roll overs even if they say they won't). Reserved instances get you ~70% discounts - similar to the committed spending. And my favorite - if it works for you - spot instances on EC2 come at as high as 90% off.

Nobody at commercial volume pays list to AWS - everyone gets a discount.


How about S3? I haven’t personally seen them price that so aggressively but I have a limited sample set.

You can sometimes get a committed use discount within certain regions. Not as extreme as the EC2 discount, since S3 storage costs are honestly pretty low when you use storage classes correctly.

Everywhere I've worked discounts have been 40-60%. If you're getting leas than 40% whoever manages your cloud account isn't doing one of their job duties.

Even 1/3 of the AWS egress list price is a rip-off.

How to not pay full price on AWS? We pay $10K+ per month and nobody gives us any discount.

You talk to your account rep to do a guaranteed spend in exchange for a discount.

Some services get large discounts, some don’t. Depends on utilization. For 10k you should get a lot.


To be fair, for aws that is hobbyist numbers. We (400 people data company) pay 10 times that amount. Let alone big enterprises.

We do get discount, but it wont make it cheap.


There’s a lot of middleground between hobbyists and your company’s use ;) Most mid-sized publishers I’ve worked with are in the $4-10k/mo range depending on CDN availability

Of course, I agree.

My point is that the parent I was replying to replied to “only hobbyists pay full price on aws”. The parent was expecting to get a discount on a 10k monthly bill. It is a lot of money, but not to AWS. You probably wont get (much) discount on 10k a month.


upthread: "[No one] pays full price"

later: "no one who spends more than $10k/month pays full price"

curious, that no one says what their bills are when they say "40-60% discount", right? This thread started because someone mentioned dell/netapp because they were half the price of AWS, all-in.

I notice a lot of threads do this, lately. Not this topic, but topics in general.


What kind of hobby do you have where you’re spending $10k/month?

I see you've never heard of Warhammer 40k

I see you haven't heard of SLA printers

Holy shit, it's brutal. What do you sell and how many customers do you have?

Savings plans and reserved instances will get you at least 50% off EC2, RDS, and some other things

At previous $WORK we had similar bills. Our Account Manager got us some deals on S3 storage and egress fee (via CloudFront), in exchange for some usage commitment. It was AWS Europe though, it may be different in the US.

The good discounts start around 100x your spend.

If you are comfortable with making a commit 1-3 year commit - you can get 27-50% discounts at pretty much any spend I think.

https://aws.amazon.com/savingsplans/compute-pricing/


Right, but depending on your workload, compute might just be 1/3 to 1/2 of your spend. The remainder going on storage, networking (egress and internal between regions & AZs), LBs, and higher abstraction services (from queues to search to serverless).

Feels great to talk about 27-50% but turns out it's 9%-16% when all is said and done. You can get commitment savings on other services but you need higher spend.

Feels odd that big cloud gives better discounts to enterprise. They really don't cater to startups as much as they posture.


You pay $1 million per month for AWS?

I guess it's a good thing I'm not talking about list price. Do you really think when you're doing a cost comparison of AWS S3 to NetApp or Dell object storage a fortune 500 says: go ahead and use list pricing for the comparison? We plug in their existing discount structure... because otherwise it would be a rather pointless exercise for everyone involved.

Agreed and for most smaller use cases theres always b2 from Backblaze.

Is anyone getting discounts on S3? There's easy ways to save on compute like reserved instances but I haven't found anything for storage other than the tiering system.

That, in itself, should be plenty of reason to stay the hell away from it.

Cloudflare is the cheapest, from what I understand, due to free egress and competitive pricing: https://www.cloudflare.com/developer-platform/products/r2/



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