Totally. I'm not advocating that people don't ever use it for this. I'm just saying that from a pure resource perspective, it might be one of the least resource-efficient mechanisms for doing this.

As others have pointed out, it's probably not a noticeable cost and, in fact, the fixed costs associated with setting something up yourself would far outweigh what you're paying to use S3 for this purpose.

Part of me just dies inside when I think of all the stuff needlessly happening behind the scenes, given it's not actually being used for storage. I mean, it's called Simple Storage Service.