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That would imply they have a way to offer said reduced redundancy in a cost-saving way.

With s3 it's easy: store fewer copies.

With ec2, it's much harder.

You don't have to actually offer reduced redundancy to have multiple price points. Amazon could have added an option for big corporations to pay more for the increased SLA, the existence of the improved service agreement itself being the thing you're paying for.

Actual availability numbers is often secondary to Big Corp customers. The benefit of the CYA/SLA agreement, is that when shit does hit the fan, as the manager you get to shrug and say "well, we bought the improved SLA, not my fault Amazon failed to deliver".

To be clear, you will pay more unless you have enough scale to already run more than {num_AZs_in_region} nodes for your workload.

If you want to be sure you get paid if you’re offline, your workloads have to be spread across all AZs in the region.

Otherwise your subset of AZs can go down and because it’s not the whole region you won’t get paid.

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