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Comment by jacurtis | Hacker News Reader

Yes it is really just a free tier expansion. But many sites today would essentially be able to completely live under the free tier for the foreseeable future, who were previously paying for it. Which I guess makes it a price reduction. Even a company with 2Tb of egress traffic would now only pay for 1Tb instead of 1.95Tb. Which makes it nearly a 50% price reduction.

So I guess... it depends how you look at it.

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And if you need 100TB of bandwidth it's a 1% discount.

My guess is that the majority of their revenue is coming from a few big customers, for whom this is not a relevant discount at all. I thinkt that they are introducing this offer to get developers to adopt AWS for small projects, hoping that they'll then use the same service they are already familiar with for big projects.

Over 150TB I think you are easily down to 50% off their base rate already aren't you? $50/TB or so?

Any discount only applies to the traffic that exceeds that number.

In other words, if 151 TB total is consumed:

* first 150 TB at full price

* next 1 TB discounted

> the majority of their revenue is coming from a few big customers

A very significant percentage of their revenue comes from Netlix, Heroku, and several others that run their entire infrastructure on AWS.

Netflix does not run their entire infrastructure on AWS. Final delivery of content still comes from OpenConnect (their own CDN). IOW, they migrated all of their non-CDN functions to AWS, but content delivery is still handled by OpenConnect appliances installed at key peering points within ISP networks.

Won't all there enterprise clients negotiate bulk rates anyways ?

AWS can't do too much to clients with the capital to build their own data systems

I don't think this is Amazon's intention. AWS does not make its money from SMEs.

This is about courting developers. If Cloudflare is going to make it free to play with all their tools, and only start charging when usage becomes "real" then they have a good chance of winning over the dev community. AWS can't let that happen, because they know then the enterprise rot will start.

Doesn't free tier last only 12 months?

In this case it’s 1tb free every year. They didn’t put the 12 months stipulation on it.

Not entirely, certain services are free forever and this reduction is one of them.

Some free tier quotas only last 12 months, others are indefinite. From the first paragraph of the linked article, they are removing the 12mo limit on the monthly free bandwidth allowance:

> Free data transfer out of CloudFront is no longer limited to the first 12 months. [..,] Free data transfer out from AWS Regions is also no longer limited to the first 12 months.

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