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Comment by Nathanba | Hacker News Reader

It might be cheap now but there is absolutely no guarantee that one day they'll send out a fairly nondescriptive AGB update email and increase the prices without you knowing. Then because all these ever so helpful cloud services don't allow you to create payment caps the costs can explode any day. It's all one executive decision away.

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Historically speaking, in the ~15 years AWS has been around, have they ever increased prices for any service? In my experience, they've only ever decreased prices of their services as advances in tech have been made rather than increasing them. Sure some start out being expensive cough Macie and Fargate cough but they didn't increase prices after being launched as far as I'm aware.

Assuming they never have increased a price in 15 years, that doesn't prevent them from doing so, but it's a confidence inspiring track record.

I have about as much confidence that AWS won't raise prices on existing services/features as I do that Google will eventually kill another good project - https://killedbygoogle.com/

The fact that they don't have a simple price cap setting proves to me that they have no intention of being on my side. Promises of businesses that they won't increase prices are .. well, it just means almost nothing to me. It's "nice".

I feel like AWS has a pretty good track record at this point for not increasing prices - certainly to the point that I trust them not to pull an Oracle. (Hypothetically, my volume of data stored with them is low enough that even a 10x gouge would just make me angry, not wound me financially. There's not a mechanism for these archives to incur explosive costs, but your point is why I avoid other less-predictable cloud services.)

Don’t be silly. It’s a game theoretic certainty that they will indeed pull an Oracle.

There's no need to act condescending or call people names ("silly"). A 15 year track record and a public commitment aren't things you can hand wave away.

I'd also point out there's no substance behind your "game theoretic" jargon.

The parent put it too strongly but it's equally naive to assume that track records and public commitments mean anything to a privately-held company, with a commitment to profit shareholders, run by Jeff Bezos.

I can’t believe this needs to be spelled out.

Of course AWS needs to make money.

Of course they make more money in the short term if they raise prices.

Of course this affects their long term revenue and profitability because customers are afraid that prices of any of the products they use could rise.

Say whatever you want about Amazon, but they have never been a company that cares about the short term. They care about profits for the next 20 years, not Q3 2022.

You’re calling me/my views naive? Seriously? Just after I excoriated someone for name calling?

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