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A well-known still-private YC unicorn has a similar spend to this, if not more.

Thousands of beefy EC2 instances, petabytes of warm-to-hot S3 objects, chunky RDS instances and a large data warehouse add up pretty quick.

It's important to note that these negotiated prices are way, way less than the sticker price. It's a win-win.

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or you could pay $1m to someone like Corey to revisit the architecture a little and shave $100-200m off that bill by not doing silly things? https://www.lastweekinaws.com/about/

Usually a large company has people as smart as Corey to avoid mistakes. AWS also tends to assign solution architects to contracts this large to help customers avoid waste. Sure, it loses them some spend, but the customer obsession earns them more trust.

Corey recently blogged why Lyft is reasonable to pay a similar sum to AWS: https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/4-reasons-lyft-is-smart-t...

In short: it does not matter for a company that does not even have a profit and probably won‘t reach break-even soon. It‘s a waste of time to cut cloud-computing cost at that stage of the company.

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