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Comment by AtlasBarfed | Hacker News Reader

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AtlasBarfed·

The biggest problem is the cost.

Actual storage cost is "meh" but...

My god the absolute highway robbery of the bandwidth costs.

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Amazon's profit margins on data transfer are out of this world, like probably > 80%. Data transfer costs are hard and confusing to predict (especially with different regions, etc), so it makes sense they'd gouge on it more than storage.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/05/how-amazon-web-services-make...

Cloudflare R2 has an S3 compatible API and no egress costs.

I like Cloudflare, but this is also what makes me skeptical. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and I've had the rug pulled out from underneath me many times before. I wish they at least charged a sustainable amount for egress, because I feel like it's coming eventually.

Yeah you do have to wonder if this is destined for enshittification at some point. It does seem a bit to good to be true.

Supposedly it’s not applicable to R2, but their Enterprise egress pricing is around the $0.05/GB rate. They won’t contact you though until you start to get close to the $5,000/month usage level, which itself can be a problem as your fee goes from $0/month to $5,000/month.

R2 still has per-request fees which, given PUTs are still $4.50/million and GETs $0.36/million (only about 10% off S3’s), they still have significant margin there to cover egress for objects of reasonable size.

Yeah - I forgot about their opaque pricing tiers.

One other benefit of paying up front is that I think you are less restricted on S3/Cloudfront in what you can host. I think Cloudflare has some restrictions (video files?) to keep costs more sane. Otherwise, you could spin up a YouTube clone extremely cheap.

And just to reiterate, AWS pricing can be absurd.

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