Common misconception. The prices are highly negotiable. Nobody with significant traffic is paying anything close to book rates.
That is a lot of negotiation that needs to be done. Will they get anywhere close to that kind of discount?
How big a customer do you need to be?
(Speculation based on how AWS prices things: Build big, charge for everything, charge what it actually costs with a small markup, and put every high-margin provider out of business)
So if what you're saying is right, that would be just another reason for most small companies to avoid Amazon. If you're wrong, other comments in this thread have also given a good reason for small companies to avoid Amazon.
Some people even take that "confidential" offer letter for volume pricing and shop it around to other cloud providers. Shocker!
There are some growth incentives (eg, prepay $3MM for next year, get 6% off all services), and there are some tiered savings (e.g. 5% off on more than $500k of RIs in a single region), but I've never seen a plausible, verifiable incident of people successfully negotiating AWS rates downward.
Do you have any evidence of this at all?
Maybe they're milking your investors. Maybe you've built some absurd contraption that they know you won't be able to move elsewhere. Or maybe you need to hire a better negotiator.
Given that we couldn't get it; and that nobody from our company's entire VC network could get it; and that nobody on my CTO email list could get it... I'm going to continue thinking that the anonymous HN commenter is talking out of his ass.
But if you can prove me wrong, I'd be thrilled to be wrong.
Anonymous commenter versus 11-hour old throwaway account... who wins?
Looking at a few words in your rebuttal above and combining it with the tone you're using, I can come up with quite a few reasons you might not have gotten the discount you sought.
I'd suggest you put down the "CTO email list" and let an actual business person handle this for you. Handshakes and existing relationships still matter in this world. Good luck!
That said, no point in arguing further with a liar and/or troll. You're not getting 10x discounts on your AWS bill. You're not fooling me or anybody else.
What would use this much computing power, besides bitcoin mining, or popular top 100 site? Maybe an online game? Just curious.
When situations like this come up I always suggest people read the history of Western Electric. Talk about scale!
As such, $500k/mo isn't a terribly elite club. Essentially every SaaS company that does more than $10MM/mo of revenue is spending as much or more than we are.
Softlayer no longer includes 5TB on every virtual server and their bandwidth is equally outrageous so I'm still evaluating a plan for new servers.
That is to say, the reason you can negotiate a discount once you get well past that point (or if you intend to grow well past that point) is because staying on AWS makes increasingly less sense for you.
Not anymore. In the US, you can now write off $500K/year in equipment costs immediately.
> It also means shifting expenses from monthly as-you-go to mostly upfront.
Dedicated server provider or lease the equipment instead of buy.