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Comment by camhart | Hacker News Reader

I've learned that AWS pricing tends to improve over time, and I appreciate it. I just recently switched from a startup offering authorization to AWS Cognito because the startup kept raising their price(s).

It's nice to see this drop, though I'm sure Amazon does it due to competition as well.

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This is an analysis from 2018ish - https://www.stayclassyinternet.com/articles/investigating-AW...

It's nice to see that AWS is using their economy of scale to reduce their own costs, and passing that on to the consumer.

I don't think they are doing it to be nice to consumers. I think they are doing it to cost less than competitors.

I didn't mean to imply that they did it to be kind, I think it's clear they made this change to be more competitive in the market place.

It's still great to see.

Isn't that the same in practice?

You get customers by being nice to them. Being nice to customers means competitive pricing, high quality support, good documentation, easy integration, etc. It's all driving towards the same goal.

Naming good documentation and high quality support in conjunction with AWS is a bit weird to me. Though parent was talking about using their scale to improve prices. They might just reduce their margins at the moment.

It's not necessarily the same in outcome. Undercutting competitors can be a temporary thing. As soon as the competitors are eliminated you jack the prices up. Doing it to be nice to customers can potentially last even after competitors go belly up. Then again, Google's motto used to be "do no evil" (basically be nice to customers). That obviously went the way of the dodo bird.

>>As soon as the competitors are eliminated you jack the prices up

And then you provide a competitor or startup another opportunity.

Eventually. But Amazon has the headspace to drop prices for as long as they need to kill the new competition. Only someone like Google or MS will be able to keep up as long as they can automate a lot and use money from ads or software licenses to prop up their cloud business.

FWIW I was informed by an AWS employee that their internal philosophy is to keep pricing at cost+ levels, which is a strategic play - it forces the operations to remain lean and discourages many competitors from trying to wedge themselves into the cost-price gap.

Fat profit margins attract competition, this is what happened when Oracle/Unix combo were chewed up by Microsoft Windows/SQL from the bottom, and then Linux/MySQL started chewing up Microsoft from their bottom. It's the dog-eats-dog world.

"Your margin is my opportunity."

- Jeff Bezos

I think everyone is already aware of the fact that AWS is a company.

Are you implying that they are trying to make money?

I'm implying that they are trying to undercut competition to drive them out of business so they can then raise prices across the board.

It’s more that computing gets cheaper over time because of advancements in cpu performance and lowering of storage costs.

AWS doesn’t really ever have a reason to raise costs, it doesn’t have to lowball costs to attract customers in the first place.

I used to own some internal services where we had a model very similar to AWS for cost recovery.

It’s an interesting model because apps either optimize for or happen to fall into “loopholes” where some customers end up getting more value than others or may turn into a financial liability at scale.

For example, think about authentication... charging per auth will mean that some use cases will be nearly free, as some external users may only sign in once per quarter. But charging a flat rate has the opposite effect. You have to design the service and tweak the metrics and rates to make it work.

I just recently switched from a startup offering authorization to AWS Cognito because the startup kept raising their price(s).

Maybe because they know Cognito is horrible? ;)

OTOH, I have never seen DynamoDB prices decreasing.

The introduction of DynamoDB on-demand pricing was a huge price reduction for some workloads with the additional benefit of also reducing the complexity of scaling capacity as well.

What don't you like about cognito? I've been able to solve every auth problem I've encountered with it.

On demand pricing dropped our DynamoDB cost by ~20%.

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