Should we expect S3 to lower prices?
That’s an annual decrease of 13%. Imagine your S3 bill went down by that amount every year.
Here is a brief history of S3 storage cost, in us-east-2:
- 2010: $150/TB
- 2011: $125/TB
- 2012: $110/TB
- 2014: $31/TB
- 2016: $23/TB
- Today: the same
Soon enough it’ll be a decade of fixed pricing.
# Some Rebuttals
### This isn't an Apples to Apples Comparison
That's right - it's not.
S3 doesn’t just buy 1 TB of hard disk and sell it to you. It stores a few copies of the data (Erasure Coding) and keeps extra, free storage capacity.
So you would expect to pay at least a few times the cost of an HDD, since 1 TB stored in S3 probably takes up 3+ TB of underlying disk capacity.
Nevertheless - three TBs costs around $33 in hardware costs and last for 10 years. One TB in S3 for 10 years is equal to $2.82k - that's around 86x above.
### The Software is Worth The Cost
The sense I got from people arguing this to me is that the software is priceless.
It's true - there is a premium to be paid on the fact that S3 is infinitely scalable, never down, incredibly highly-durable (eleven 9s). I acknowledge that. But I'm not sure if that aspect is not overvalued - the price difference is huge.
### Power Costs Have Gone Up
This is partly true but not a justification imo. In the last 25 years, Virginia has registered a 2.6% annual electricity price increase[2]. In 1998 its rate was 7.51 cents/kWh and today it's 14.34 cents/kWh.
Assuming 24/7 activity, a hard drives uses around 220 watt-hours per day. That's ~6,710 per month and 80,520 per year. 80.52 kWh at the high 14.34 cents/kWh is $11.54 a year. Assume there are three 22TB drives for each 22TB you store (to account for replication and free space) - that's just $35 a year.
Your annual S3 bill for those 22TB would be close to $6217, so electricity is barely 0.5% of that. It could go up 2x in a year (unheard of) and still be a rounding error.
### Keeping Steady Prices Against Inflation Is Like Lowering Them
It's true that we had high inflation in the last few years - but we should think about the underlying costs to the provider that went up.
I would assume S3 cost majorily consists of hard drives, a smaller amount of CPU/RAM and software engineers. It's just the engineers' salary that has went up since.
### There's no Incentive!
I think this is the right answer.
There's no incentive for AWS to lower the prices, so from a business point of view - it would be an awful decision to do so.
What do you think? Should we expect them to lower the cost?
Similarly - does your organization's S3 costs ever become a problem?
[1] - https://www.datawrapper.de/_/hyabD/
[2] - https://www.solarreviews.com/blog/average-electricity-cost-increase-per-year