From S3 to R2: An economic opportunity

Amazon doesn't have unit cost for egress. They charge you for the stuff you put through their pipe, while paying their transit providers only for the size of the pipe (or more often, not paying them anything since they just peer directly with them at an exchange point).

Amazon uses $/gb as a price gouging mechanism and also a QoS constraint. Every bit you send through their pipe is basically printing money for them, but they don't want to give you a reserved fraction of the pipe because then other people can't push their bits through that fraction. So they get the most efficient utilization by charging for the stuff you send through it, ripping everybody off equally.

Also, this way it's not cost effective to build a competitor to Amazon (or any bandwidth intensive business like a CDN or VPN) on top of Amazon itself. You fundamentally need to charge more by adding a layer of virtualization, which means "PaaS" companies built on Amazon are never a threat to AWS and actually symbiotically grow the revenue of the ecosystem by passing the price gouging onto their own customers.

You don't get charge for transit if you are sending stuff IN from the internet or to any other AWS resource in that region. So there is no QOS constraint inside except for perhaps paying for the S3 GET/SELECT/LIST costs.

It is pretty much exclusively to lock you into their services. It heavily impacts multi-cloud and outside of AWS service decisions when your data lives in AWS and is taxed at 5-9 cents a GB to come out. We have settled for inferior AWS solutions at times because the cost of moving things out is prohibitive (IE AWS Backup vs other providers)

AWS egress charges blatantly take advantage of people who have never bought transit or done peering.

To them "that's just what bandwidth costs" but anyone who's worked with this stuff (sounds like you and I both) can do the quick math and see what kind of money printing machine this scheme is.

Honest question, how is this different than a toll road? An entity creates a road network with a certain size (lanes, capacity/hour, literal traffic) and pays for it by charging individual cars put through the road.

Author here - have you tried using R2? As others mentioned there's also Sippy (https://developers.cloudflare.com/r2/data-migration/sippy/) which makes this easy to try.

It also makes things like just using RDS for your managed database and having compute nearby but with another provider often incredibly expensive.

Or, really, any capital intensive business that makes money through operating costs based on usage rather than total capacity.

The difference is that Amazon doesn’t own the road, they’re just a truck driver. Amazon customers rent space on the truck and pay whatever the driver asks them for.

It's also a way to choose your customers.

Some people want to host a lot of warez and pirate movies and stuff but that doesn't monetize very well per GB consumed so pricing bandwidth high means those people never show up, thus saving a lot of trouble for AWS.

I remember when salesforce.com announced a service that would let you serve up web pages out of their database, it was priced crazy high (100-1000x too much) from the viewpoint of "I want to run a blog on this service" but for someone who wanted to put in a form to collect data from customers it was totally affordable. Salesforce knew which customers it wanted and priced accordingly.

Yeah ok but you still need a ticket to board the truck/bus, right? The more people in your family, the more tickets.

The issue isn’t charging for egress, but charging excessively.

There's at least a couple of reasons that your analogy doesn't really work.

First a lot of these roads are 'free' and yet you're still being charged for it. If two large networks come to an agreement then they connect the two networks (ie build that road), but no money changes hands.

Second if there is a paid peering agreement in place (ie say AWS had a cost to push your data out), that still wouldn't be billed to them in the way they're charging you. Instead they'd be paying for the rate of traffic at something like the 95th percentile of the max. This means that you could download a petabyte of data from them when the pipe isn't busy and cost them nothing, or you could download a gigabyte when it's busy and push up the costs.

The toll road is the only way out of the county and it's charging $90. That's what's different.