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Comment by rckrd | Hacker News Reader

Those blog posts are a good start. I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class. AFAIK there are some third parties that track the granular data, but it's not preserved anywhere on the AWS page. A lot of price decreases also might have happened silently (without a blog post) or as de facto decreases (widely but privately negotiated, e.g. "sticker price").

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> I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class.

You were referring to the announcements and these announcements are still available.

The actual pricing pages of course only show current prices. What would be the motivation for AWS to show outdated prices there as well? No other company I can think of does that and given the complexity of the pricing structure for AWS services that'd only confuse users even more.

> A lot of price decreases also might have happened silently (without a blog post)

Do you have an example for that or is this just hearsay?

> or as de facto decreases (widely but privately negotiated, e.g. "sticker price")

Privately negotiated deals aren't regular price reductions as they're only available for customers with a fairly large spend for such AWS services.

I can say that price _increases_ happened for a few AWS products in specific regions/countries without blog posts. Often AWS simply emails affected customers 1-3 months in advance and after making the change. That said, I imagine prices shifted due to currency, labour costs, energy costs or other regional concerns. And I’ve seen the opposite - I’ve seen AWS freeze prices and eat the cost differences long after they should have raised costs. It varies by product and region and marketing strategy, I expect.

The only rule of thumb is what is posted on the pricing page is supposed to be what you get charged. No APIs exist for the most part, and the actual charges can sometimes differ anyway (e.g. grandfathered pricing etc.)

I don't disagree with you but as parent said, op was talking specifically about decreases.

> Those blog posts are a good start. I was referencing the full pricing page for s3 that breaks down by region and class.

This is not a good look.

From your blog post:

> It's hard to come to a firm conclusion since pricing data is held very secretly (AWS quickly deletes announcements of historical price decreases).

There’s nothing wrong with “I missed that. Thanks, let me update the blog”.

If that's his core argument then it undermines the entire blog post right? Not to mention it calls into question other information he's provided .All AWS pricing is available publicly , saying the prices are "held very secretly" and being obviously wrong isn't a good look.

It doesn't appear to be his core argument, so what is the point of this hypothetical?

That was incorrect of me to say. I was trying to say something like "He only has x key (core) points and if one is wrong it doesn't look good"

I used "core" incorrectly

> as de facto decreases (widely but privately negotiated, e.g. "sticker price").

Widely, AWS doesn't negotiate on pricing. Small business get the list price or they can switch to another cloud. Medium and large businesses (from 100 employees to Fortune 500) get blanket discounts (excl. some specific line items) in exchange for a spend commitment, e.g. if you commit to at least $10M AWS spend per year, you'll get a 10% discount for all your spend. It doesn't give different discounts to S3 compared to other AWS products.

Do unique top-top-tier customers of AWS get special S3 pricing? Nice for them, but it isn't _widely_.

I don‘t know about S3 specifically but with a large enough consumption you can negotiate a specific rate card for individual AWS services in addition your Enterprise discount.

FWIW $10M is at least 1 order of magnitude, and in some cases 2 orders of magnitude higher than necessary in order to negotiate discounts, depending on services used.

AFAIK enterprise discounts start at or above $1M. I don't have recent data on minimums or common discount rates.

I was at two companies that negotiated data transfer rates with a minimum commitment . I think one was $0.01/GB min of 5PB a month.

I think at one company I worked, our discount specifically excluded data transfer. It is X% off for all AWS services not including their data transfer costs (both inter-AZ and extra-VPC). It makes sense to me that AWS, with their networking-heavy pricing, negotiates on services and data transfer separately.

I expect pricing is probably pretty bespoke, given there are humans involved. I worked for a company that had X% off all AWS costs, including all data transfer - except for CloudFront, which had a whole separate negotiated rate card (including data transfer, per-request rates, etc.).

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