Thank you for this. I’m surprised that CloudFlare didn’t mention it in an otherwise thorough post. After all, the reason they’re trying to pressure AWS to change is that they’d like to offer services to AWS customers without bandwidth markup. Essentially competing with existing AWS services on an even footing.

This to me makes it unlikely that AWS will change their bandwidth pricing. If it was just about this revenue source disappearing, they might bite the bullet and hope that the lower prices would attract more customers in the long term. But bandwidth pricing is the moat around their castle. If it didn’t exist, Snowflake and others would leave. But more than that, new AWS services benefit from the captive audience choosing them by default. Without the moat, each service has to compete on its merits. AWS Lambda, for example would need to be better than CloudFlare Workers or fly.io containers. It won’t win customers like it does today just because it’s “free” bandwidth.

Removing these fees is a risk AWS is currently choosing not to take. And they won’t change their pricing regardless of the number of blog posts that competitors write. The only thing that would force a change is an exodus of customers leaving AWS citing this as a reason.