It’s actually hard to say. The prices these companies pay can be very different than list prices for us mortals. It’s one of my biggest complaints about AWS; the prices seem high, but in reality they are very opaque.
I should be able to store my data at the exact same $/TB price as Epic Games, for example. They once mentioned it costs them less than a penny to serve several GB from AWS - why the fuck is it more expensive for me?
At some point of very large usage, you also have to work with AWS teams to give input on your demand forecast.
Unless you have such large usage you get list price, that also gives you the illusion of infinite elasticity.
This is not exclusive to AWS though, all hyperscalers have this policy.
You might not be stupid, but there are people who look _just like you_ who will email support over a six cent billing issue which turns out to be correct anyway - but just burned a couple hours of support people’s time.
Epic probably doesn’t do stuff like that.
I’m sure if you had the same volume as Netflix you would pay less than the retail price to.
If you ever flew on a plane, I can guarantee you that there are probably 20+ different prices being charged for the same seat.
You spend far less money than a corporation, and there are customer costs beyond the actual bandwidth/compute charges.
Why? Different people get different prices for products all the time. It's fundamental to a functioning free market.