

A simplified S3 pricing page - kevindavis
http://s3pricing.herokuapp.com/

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B-Con
It's not granular enough for small scale/personal use. If someone were
considering using S3 for a small project, or even just personal backup, this
wouldn't really help them.

The sliders should offer some way to get more granularity. Maybe scale the
sliders the higher they go, or have a separate option to select the scale you
want to work on.

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kalid
Shameless plug, but I have a pet project to help with these types of
calculations. I made a quick calc here:

<http://instacalc.com/4471>

You can type in any amounts you need. OP has a great visualization though!

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hobonumber1
This is great!

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kalid
Thanks, it's been in the works for a while but it's a fun side thing.

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mmahemoff
"Amazon's pricing page was kind of.. ass."

Given Heroku's popularity and the simplicity of its sliders, why has Amazon
not put in a few days to build this on S3? I'm asking genuinely as I'm
wondering if it really is enterprisey oversight or it really gets them more
signups or usage without providing this kind of tool.

As a historical sideline, Amazon is no stranger to sliders. Its diamond search
(of all things) was one of the first uses of sliders afaik to narrow down a
search, in the early days of Ajax ([http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-showcase-
amazoncom-diamond-...](http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-showcase-amazoncom-
diamond-search) \- mentioned in May, 2005)

Also surprising there's no affiliate programme for S3, coming from the mother
of all affiliate programmes.

~~~
wtn
If it was obvious how much it cost, fewer people would use it.

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cdawzrd
Doesn't work on my phone. I am used to seeing slider controls that don't
support dragging on touchscreens, but these don't appear to support the
fallback of tapping a point on the scale to move the slide to that point.

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diego
Nice. Feature request: please make the scale logarithmic (at least as an
option).

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kevindavis
Busy with work through this weekend most likely.. feel free to submit a pull
request for log scaling: <https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing>

Will obviously give credit..

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hippich
For me complex part is S3 pricing is IO requests. I have no clue how many
requests expect. If you could find approximate values and make a list like:
Webpage (1000 Read requests and 10 Write requests), Web Application (10000
read and 10000 write), etc. Or some other way to get an idea of what it should
be approximately...

That's my biggest problem with pricing S3.. May be I am alone in that.

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tnuc
The sliders for Storage and Data transfer would be more helpful if I could
choose lower value.

More people work with Gigabytes than Terrabytes.

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rco8786
Azure has had this pricing scale for a long time.

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res0nat0r
I don't know why most people don't just use the official AWS calculator.
<http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html>

Sure it's not web 2.0 and ajaxy but it supports almost every single service
and is easy to use.

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m-i
Wow! S3 is really expensive.

~~~
richardkeller
Compared to what? I'm very curious to find out alternatives that are cheaper
than Amazon.

~~~
m-i
Compared to Hetzner. Not a cloud provider, but a root server provider. It's
also more expensive than Strato - also a root server provider. Of course, not
with the same availability, but for most startups it's more than enough.

~~~
tillk
You compare a hoster for servers with a storage solution. Don't get me wrong,
I know that hetzner offers cheap iron and it's really amazing, but all this
comes at the expense of the network and the support.

RE: S3 – it scales any time and on demand. I can upload 2 TB starting now and
don't have to order a server which may or may not be around on Monday
(tomorrow). You could compare S3 to something like Rackspace Cloudfiles or
Nirvanix. Your Hetzner argument makes little sense – not even as far as TCO is
concerned.

Also, good luck recovering your servers and storage array on a public holiday
in Bavaria. ;)

~~~
m-i
Yes, you are right: if you need all those things you mention, than hetzner is
not an alternative. However most startups an small busnisses don't, and maybe
never will. I mentioned Hetzner because it's the most known here, but there
are many other similar providers.

I'm using several Strato root servers since almost 10 years and never had an
incident so far, even if it's "low" availability.

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kevindavis
let me know if folks have any problems / would like any additional features

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malvim
Love the idea and implementation, thanks a lot for this!

Though more granularity, as it has been said, would be nice, this is good
enough for me and lots of people as it is right now.

What I REALLY would like to see (and I know this is not really a feature
request for this, but just an idea I'm throwing out there) is this made for
other Amazon AWS services as well.

Common scenarios, like "I would like to run a wordpress site on an EC2
instance serving a couple thousand hits per month", or "I'd like to store a 1
TB backup of my personal computer on Glacier and retrieve it when my computer
crashes (say in 1 year)".

The point is, like you said yourself, if you're spending a lot of money, you
shouldn't trust anyone else, but having these "ballpark figures" would be
really useful for people that are considering these services.

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mfringel
To that point, it's hard to get a handle on how many GET, LIST, POST, etc.
operations one would routinely do in the course of a blog or something else.
While that can get pretty complex (especially if you end up throwing varnish
in to minimize calls to your datastore), a calculator including various rules
of thumb would be great.

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neerajdotname2
Can you open source the code? I can use it.

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kevindavis
<https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing>

note, it was largely adapted from the pricing page on database.com

~~~
niggler
This was a wholesale scrape:

[https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing/blob/master/public/...](https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing/blob/master/public/images/dbdc-
logo-reversed.png)

Why do you have the database.com logo in your repo?

~~~
kevindavis
Yup - downloaded the database.com pricing page to start and hadn't gotten to
removing unused images etc. removed this and some other stuff.

There is definitely still a whack of CSS that doesn't apply :)

Thanks!

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_suoiruc
Maybe you could add in price comparisons to Dropbox, since they are just an S3
reseller.

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creativityhurts
I think they are a bit more than just a reseller.

~~~
_suoiruc
Perhaps you could expand on that?

If you pay for Dropbox what exactly are you paying for? Software to
communicate with S3?

I'll accept that the software (python+rsync+an icon) is arguably "value
added", but for the paying Dropbox user, what they are getting is still S3
storage.

Am I missing something?

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statictype
You're paying for a service that auto syncs your data across multiple devices
efficiently and keeps versioned backups of everything. The fact that they
currently use s3 for storage is an implementation detail.

~~~
_suoiruc
So basically it's the same as rsync and a little scripting, but without
commands and scriptability? I don't use Dropbox so I'm curious. I'd like to
know if they're offering something to paying customers that S3 does not, apart
from their particular combination of python and rsync. If we just focus on
storage is Dropbox more expensive? If yes, by how much? I think this is a
valid question.

~~~
statictype
If you just focus on storage, yes, Dropbox is more expensive.

But this is kind of like saying iOS is just an expensive closed variant of
FreeBSD.

Since I'm not drawing a salary from Dropbox's marketing division, I'm not
going to go in depth here but I'll just say that Dropbox can be used easily
and efficiently by normal people who have never seen a command line. Whereas
your home brew python+rsync scripts can only be used by nerds like us.

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jkaljundi
Took me a while to understand this is not about the world's best mobile phone
:)

