AWS Has Raised Prices Before

April 3rd, 2023
tech
There's some speculation around whether AWS will need to raise their prices, as many tech companies announce inflation-driven increases. One consideration that people will sometimes give is that AWS has never raised prices before, except that this isn't quite true. The following is not actually important, but I want to write it up anyway out of pedantry.

When AWS S3 launched in March 2006 their initial pricing was:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.20 per GB - data uploaded $0.20 per GB - data downloaded

In June 2007 they switched to:

Storage
$0.15 per GB-Month of storage used

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data uploaded
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB

Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 is free of charge

Requests
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

They went from requests being free to a low per-request charge, lowering the data transfer cost at the same time. For very request-heavy workloads this was a price increase on balance, and some customers needed to make implementation changes to avoid sending so many requests.

That this was, as far as I know, the only time they've raised prices in 15+ years is impressive, and speaks well of their commitment to predictability. But it just annoys me when people claim they've never done it.

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