There’s some speculation around whether AWS will need to raise their prices, as many tech companies announce inflation-driven increases. One consideration that people will sometimes give is that AWS has never raised prices before, except that this isn’t quite true. The following is not actually important, but I want to write it up anyway out of pedantry.
When AWS S3 launched in March 2006 their initial pricing was:
Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage usedData Transfer
$0.20 per GB—data uploaded $0.20 per GB—data downloaded
In June 2007 they switched to:
Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage usedData Transfer
$0.10 per GB—all data uploaded
$0.18 per GB—first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB—next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB—data downloaded / month over 50 TBData transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge
Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests
They went from requests being free to a low per-request charge, lowering the data transfer cost at the same time. For very request-heavy workloads this was a price increase on balance, and some customers needed to make implementation changes to avoid sending so many requests.
That this was, as far as I know, the only time they’ve raised prices in 15+ years is impressive, and speaks well of their commitment to predictability. But it just annoys me when people claim they’ve never done it.
AWS IOT service similarly changed pricing dimensions in a way that was overall cheaper for most, but much more expensive for some use cases, basically unbundling connections, messages, and transformation/routing.
“Never” is an exaggeration, though closer to literal truth for AWS than any other good or service I know of over that scale and timeframe.
My guess (no insider knowledge beyond the general attitude) is that price changes in the next few years will be a tightening of discounts and credits, rather than a top-line list price increase.
Thanks for pointing me to this! More info: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-iot-update-better-value-with-new-pricing-model/
This being in 2017 is also a lot more relevant for modern Amazon than something from 2007.
https://github.com/SummitRoute/aws_breaking_changes/blob/main/archive.md