Ask HN: What is stopping AWS from raising prices?

nothing is literally stopping them besides a deep understanding of what it takes to make companies that can last a hundred years

amazon ruthlessly drives down costs because they know the moment they leave the door open too far, someone will eventually come in and supplant them

an example is how SQS has gotten 99% cheaper since it launched

bezos is the one who said "your margin is my opportunity"

they can one day turn around and start cranking up prices but this is how the last generation of companies (Oracle, IBM, etc) died

There are other providers that people can move to.

What do you mean? Prices are going up. Costs have been falling since AWS was introduced faster than they have reduced prices. I am willing to bet that their gross margin is higher today than it was last year, 5 years ago or 10 years ago.

Remember as well that large customers have contracts that require certain notice periods before any price increase can take effect. Even the standard customer agreement requires 30 days' notice.

Assuming they did this (and I'm talking 'add a zero to their pricing,' not 'a 5% bump'), it'd juice their revenue for a couple of years and then it would plummet as folks migrated to more economical / trustworthy options.

Most of AWS is "pointless" in the sense that all you need to be able to do is define VPCs and rent EC2 instances and deploy open source software on those instances to accomplish the same thing.

The cost that Amazon charges for all the extraneous services is priced exactly at the point where someone would rather pay those costs rather than pay developers to go implement them on EC2s.

Dont wake a sleeping dog...let's keep like this: https://aws.amazon.com/pt/blogs/aws/category/price-reduction...

At the scale that AWS operates, if they raise their prices 1% they lose some measurable percentage of their sales in response. It's not a given that raising the price raises the profits. I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing is already optimized.

Azure. It's not too bad.

I suspect doing so would probably draw some major anti-trust scrutiny.

Raising prices means a lot of hardware is doing nothing. Raising prices while some hardware shortages (flood on HDD factory, lack of top notch videocards) kind of works.

Nothing, and they already are