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It's surprising to me that cloud compute vendors make billing so complicated that a whole cottage industry of viable (?) businesses exists just to help you decipher spending.

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I think that is totally on purpose. They will get you with cheap storage or instance cost and then they will drain you with egress cost or persistent storage cost or ip addresses or whatnot.

Yup. It makes chasing the best storage deals an endless game of whack-a-mole.

S3 Intelligent Tiering actually does help with this considerably though. They do try to shift your objects to the storage class that makes the most sense cost-wise based off of access patterns and don't charge anything additional for doing that.

There is a small per object/month charge for Intelligent Tiering. The 30 day minimum, even for objects in the Frequent Access Tier, can also drown you in prorated charges if applied to a high churn prefix.

The AWS service advisor assigned to our account would actively and frequently inform us ways of reducing the cost. Apparently one of their KPIs was cost reduction for their clients. The AWS docs may be bad at surfacing the cost information but their SAs more than filled that gap.

Sure, to be assigned an SA you’ve got to be above a certain spend threshold but still it’s a pleasant experience.

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