There's a lot of articles about these things that seem to have the same summary: "I didn't read the documentation for how pricing works and then I was surprised by how pricing worked." Some people were shocked by Glacier's egress pricing and others were shocked by the cost per file. Both of these are approximately zero, most of the time, for most people, if they know what they're doing. If you don't know what you're doing and haven't read the docs you shouldn't be using Glacier.

> Cause you know, 60GB is realllly expensive to transfer :(

Network and disk IO capacity planning is hard. You can't just buy GBs of egress at $0.01 and then resell them at $0.01, because you're paying for maximum capacity and turning around and selling average usage. Similarly, when you have a bunch of data shoved into unused sections of disk, you can't just read them back out without affecting whatever else is reading from the same disk. If you want to sell something close to cost, you need to reflect the pricing structure of what you're paying to your customers.

So if you upload a bunch of data to a super-cold storage system that's even named after a geological formation that stays frozen for centuries, to remind you how cold it is, and then you make it hot by trying to download it all at once, you'd expect it to be more expensive.

Just do your regular cost-benefit analysis and it should be fine, based on how long you plan on storing the data and how likely or often you think you'll need to restore it.