Amazon S3 cascade pricing
Posted by Matt Thommes on 10/9/2008
With Amazon S3, the more you store, the more you save. New storage pricing will take effect November 1, 2008.
For U.S. users, here's the breakdown:
- $0.150 First 50 TB / month of storage used
- $0.140 Next 50 TB / month of storage used
- $0.130 Next 400 TB / month of storage used
- $0.120 Storage used / month over 500 TB
This is just for data stored. Remember, you're also charged for data transferred, which also has a cascading effect, the more you transfer:
- $0.100 per GB – all data transfer in
- $0.170 per GB – first 10 TB / month data transfer out
- $0.130 per GB – next 40 TB / month data transfer out
- $0.110 per GB – next 100 TB / month data transfer out
- $0.100 per GB – data transfer out / month over 150 TB
To put things in perspective for the casual S3 user, I currently have around 50 GB of data stored (music, files, etc), and approximately 5 GB per month transferred. This comes out to around $9.00 per month. It would take me a very long time to even meet these benchmarks for savings. I mean, seriously, when am I ever going to transfer out over 150 TB??
These savings are more lucrative for companies or web services that utilize S3 for storage. Still, worth noting as cloud computing becomes more prevalent, and Amazon S3 seems to have the lead in this category.
Do you use cloud storage other than S3? How does the pricing compare?
Comments 
# Rachel Baker at 10/9/2008 10:05 pm cst
I have been waiting for my invite to the private beta for Mosso's CloudFS. I am guessing that the pricing might match Amazon's S3 with hopefully better uptime.
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# Andy Atkinson at 10/9/2008 1:56 pm cst
John Resig said, referring to jQuery they did 1.4TB of transfer from S3, so they wouldn't hit that second tier of transfer pricing either, I wonder how large you'd have to be to take advantage of this pricing? It must represent a small portion of Amazon's business. http://twitter.com/jeresig/statuses/942138703