Amazon quite rightly charge a higher price for some portions of AWS--transparently, up front, with tools to assess usage and estimate fees beforehand--because they created a product that many organizations believe provides extraordinary value.
And for the sin of earning a profit through voluntary trade, a vocal minority of HN damns them every single time AWS is mentioned. Every time we let this evil behavior go unchallenged, all productive individuals are diminished.
Just to be clear: Amazon is not paying a variable cost for how many bits are transferred over their wires. And the standard, prior to cloud, and still in colocation, was to charge for capacity (i.e. $/gbps) rather than transfer (i.e $/gb). They are making massive, massive profits by this pricing arrangement. The cost of sustaining 100 gbps transfer for 30 days on Amazon is orders of magnitude higher than paying for one month of 100 gbps of IP transit.
They’ve normalized a pricing structure that is disconnected from any actual cost basis. You’re free to pay for it, but it’s quite amusing to say criticizing that is unjust.
Not everything is priced based on the cost of it's inputs. In this case it seems to be what the market will bear.
