How to See S3 Bucket Storage Types and Storage Costs

Love the site and the upfront screenshots.

As with all cost estimation tools, the projection is only as accurate as my usage projection -- but a nifty CLI and/or CI integration sure beats having to deal with AWS price sheets!

Time-based billing should be granular to the second/minute/hour depending on the service, but should be listed for the customer in a table upwards an order of magnitude or so.

VM instances often get turned up and down in less than an hour. Serverless functions (AWS Lambda) execute and then end in milliseconds, often.

But yes, billing should be simpler/more clearly reported and calculated. And many of their services seem to bill in overly complicated ways.

On the other hand, I think some AWS services are essentially free for small amounts of usage, so individuals have less to worry about re: billing.

More granularity tends to mean cheaper for you. Your lawyer doesn't charge you by the second because charging in chunks of 6 (or 15) minutes is more profitable for them.

If you're a very small player you're unlikely to care about the savings in question because they'll be single-digit, if that. But I'd argue that using AWS if you're a very small player -- and don't have plans to expand -- is a poor idea. Digital Ocean, Heroku etc are far more adapted to those use cases.

AWS is a poor choice at tinyscale because of how flexible it is. It's a bring-your-own-everything service. You have to set up policies in order for AWS's own services to access each other and features offered in the web UI to work properly. Their billing systems make a ton of sense for the companies that spend millions of dollars.

You would not be happy doing your grocery shopping at the warehouse that provides your local shop; and yet it would probably be cheaper overall as you'd be cutting the middleman. Of course you'd run into a lot of other issues. AWS is not stopping you from using it but still. There's a reason their most successful sales program is one that can afford dumping $100k on startups: "It's not for you."

(Disclaimer: There's a fuckton of awful, actual billing issues with AWS that obscure the bill for no good reason. Most small players complaining are not talking about those, aside maybe from the egregious bandwidth pricing.)

I don't think so. AWS is still very much in "we want to get as many people onto our platform as possible" mode, not "milk every cent possible out of existing customers" mode (yet). AWS account managers and solutions architects will go to great lengths to help you reduce your costs (and are actually incentivized to do so), because making you happy with AWS and recommend it to others is their top priority above all else. The docs may be confusing, but if you ever have any interaction with their enterprise account teams, you'll find that obfuscation could not be farther from their intentions.

The fact that S3 pricing isn't simple is just an unfortunate side effect of market segmentation taken to an extreme. And in some ways, it's a good thing. The current pricing structure allows people that have different use cases to only pay for what they need: someone using S3 for storage but not making a lot of requests will only pay for storage, while someone using S3 to store relatively little but accessing it often will only pay for accessing it, etc. If pricing were to be simplified, you would lose that ability to segment, which would be a huge loss.

I do think there is room for something like a Lightsail version of S3, where you just pay a flat fee per month for a certain GB and bandwidth allocation. But I think that should be a separate product or S3 storage class, not replace the current pricing.

Sure, to be assigned an SA you’ve got to be above a certain spend threshold but still it’s a pleasant experience.

Seems to be largely replaced by One Zone - Infrequent Access https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2018/04/announcin...