No one prices to "encourage proper use." They price for a number of variables. And I do agree that arguing they're overcharging is unfair; however, SU-pricing standards include triggers for excessive use as part of the customer guarantee. If Amazon has no problem automating the product, they can automate some billing features, like notifications and bandwidth restrictions when a customer is nearing excessive use based on the population use of a particular service.

Amazon's systems should have notified at least twice and required direct confirmation from the customer for their continued use.

We don't just make business decisions like this based off our self-interest. In this case, a failure to be resourceful on Amazon's part gave the customer one of two options: track everything manually minute-by-minute, or be surprised by an excessive bill.

>But it's totally unfair to say they're "overcharging". The pricing is set up to encourage using the service properly.

That's a very charitable take. A more cynical take is that they do it to encourage lock-in. If you already have your data stored on s3, they can get away with overcharging on compute because they know that if you switched to GCP, you'll end up paying more because of the egress costs.

>but the pricing is set up such that people use a proper cdn backed by s3, do as much as they can between ec2 <-> s3, etc. instead of making s3 the backbone of their public site.

I'm not sure what your point here is. Cloudfront costs 8.5 cents per GB of egress, meanwhile ec2 costs 9 cents per GB of egress. half a cent doesn't make the egress charges any less outrageous. That's not even including the per-request charges that cloudfront has, which probably can make it cost more than 9c/GB depending on your usage profile.

> The pricing is set up to encourage using the service properly.

Do you believe that little gem applies to all products and services, or do you reserve it to downplay AWS's notorious price gouging?