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0 pointsabtinf6y ago0 comments

It's not just hyperbole, it's grossly unjust.

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.

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TechBro86156y ago

Wait, are you saying it’s grossly unjust to criticize the pricing of Amazon’s cloud product?

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.

pests6y ago

"[...]disconnected from any actual cost basis[...]"

Not everything is priced based on the cost of it's inputs. In this case it seems to be what the market will bear.

sudosysgen6y ago

Which in this case is exorbitant and is something that we should oppose. Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers, and in some cases is a red-mark of market failure (not in this one, as of yet).

rumanator6y ago

> Pricing as much as the market will bear is not good for consumers

To be fair, that's how all products are priced in general: production cost defines the lower bound and what customers are willing to pay defines the upper bound, and the goal is to maximize what the customer pays.

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