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Comment by avodonosov | Hacker News Reader

I would say the FM in this case was unreadable. “starting at $0.011 per gigabyte”, "learn more" - no one would expect to pay $150 here.

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It's definitely sleazy of Amazon to hide the pricing info like that, but I can't imagine seeing that sentence while making a purchase and not clicking through to see how the pricing actually works. But I guess that's just me.

Not just you. But read the page referred by that "Learn more" link. It's very unclear. I mean, or course, it has unambiguous meaning. But to understand it you need to read a lengthy sheet of prose, and only deep in it, after many definitions, you must notice a phrase "we multiply your peak hourly billable retrieval rate" ... "by the number of hours in a month". What concentration of attention, and how much time a reader need to spend, to understand this important nuance?

As far as I see, in all other places they specify their pricing "per GB", and only this small phrase uncovers real meaning, which is not per actual GBs you transferred, but your peak rate multiplied by number of hours in month. IMHO this should be one of the first phrases describing the pricing model.

>Glacier is designed with the expectation that retrievals are infrequent and unusual, and data will be stored for extended periods of time. You can retrieve up to 5% of your average monthly storage (pro-rated daily) for free each month. If you choose to retrieve more than this amount of data in a month, you are charged a retrieval fee starting at $0.01 per gigabyte. Learn more.

If you want more than 5% of your data in a month, the minimum it will cost you is $0.011 per gigabyte. Click here to see how to work out how much it will cost.

It's certainly not unreadable, although to be fair, it's nowhere near as clear as it should be.

It's not unreadable, but is designed to make it difficult to realize that typical usage might result in very significant costs.

'Use Amazon Glacier, it costs about a cent!' is the essential pitch.

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