6 ms·

A simplified S3 pricing page

111 points by kevindavis 14y ago

kevindavis 14y ago
let me know if folks have any problems / would like any additional features
- brugidou 14y ago
  Unfortunately i'm unable to use it on mobile :-(
- Sujan 14y ago
  Feedback to (imho) improve: 1. Mirror the top (prices) and bottom (description) 2. Add + sign between columns, = before last
- malvim 14y ago
  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.
  - mfringel 14y ago
    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.
- thenomad 14y ago
  I was looking at this for video hosting costs - any chance the bandwidth slider could go a bit (well, a lot) higher?
B-Con 14y ago
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.
- wallawe 14y ago
  I was thinking the same thing. I've just started using S3 on a rails project for learning purposes and (I think) it's free for the amount of data I'm using. edit: props on the good work though!
- a-priori 14y ago
  The sliders should be on a log scale to accommodate both small and large users.
- kevindavis 14y ago
  Good point - I thought about this a bit and figured I could take one of a couple of approaches 1) log scale (probably a bit confusing / harder to implement) 2) a switch between personal and business (could do similar switches for other settings like region thoughts?
  - joshstrange 14y ago
    How about if you could double click on the slider to enter your own exact value. Also maybe throw in a checkbox for reduced redundancy?
- kmfrk 14y ago
  Yeah. Especially for someone who hosts a static blog.
- roywalker 14y ago
  I think that adding some popular/pre-defined packages (that could change the slider's values) would help "regular" users. About the slider, the horizontal lines are useless without references.
neerajdotname2 14y ago
Can you open source the code? I can use it.
- kevindavis 14y ago
  https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing note, it was largely adapted from the pricing page on database.com
  - niggler 14y ago
    This was a wholesale scrape: https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing/blob/master/public/images/dbdc-logo-reversed.png https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing/blob/master/public/... Why do you have the database.com logo in your repo?
    - kevindavis 14y ago
      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!
rco8786 14y ago
Azure has had this pricing scale for a long time.
diego 14y ago
Nice. Feature request: please make the scale logarithmic (at least as an option).
m-i 14y ago
Wow! S3 is really expensive.
- toomuchtodo 14y ago
  Expensive is relative. 12 cents/GB/month for %99.999999999 reliability is cheap in my opinion.
- richardkeller 14y ago
  Compared to what? I'm very curious to find out alternatives that are cheaper than Amazon.
  - m-i 14y ago
    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.
    - justincormack 14y ago
      In what way is server pricing even comparable to S3? Or are you pricing up running openstack on Hetzner?
      - m-i 14y ago
        Whatever stack or solution you want. IMHO what matters is the monthly bill: everytime I tried to use something from Amazon, I ended up paying too much. Of course, this is all relative and very subjective :).
    - tillk 14y ago
      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. ;)
_suoiruc 14y ago
Maybe you could add in price comparisons to Dropbox, since they are just an S3 reseller.
- creativityhurts 14y ago
  I think they are a bit more than just a reseller.
  - _suoiruc 14y ago
    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?
    - andrewcooke 14y ago
      my dad loves dropbox. he would be lost with s3. for most people it's not "arguably value added"; it's the difference between possible and not. (another vote for a log scale (or something equivalent, like a separate "units" that sets the scale to 1s, 10s, 100s...). also, the tick marks should be on reasonable, round values)
      - _suoiruc 14y ago
        Right. And the topic of this thread is a price matrix for S3. Presumably your Dad is not going to be looking at it.
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
        andrewcooke 14y ago
mmahemoff 14y ago
"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-search http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-showcase-amazoncom-diamond-... - mentioned in May, 2005) Also surprising there's no affiliate programme for S3, coming from the mother of all affiliate programmes.
- wtn 14y ago
  If it was obvious how much it cost, fewer people would use it.
cdawzrd 14y ago
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.
kevindavis 14y ago
Busy with work through this weekend most likely.. feel free to submit a pull request for log scaling: https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing Will obviously give credit..
tnuc 14y ago
The sliders for Storage and Data transfer would be more helpful if I could choose lower value. More people work with Gigabytes than Terrabytes.
res0nat0r 14y ago
I don't know why most people don't just use the official AWS calculator. http://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/calc5.html 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.
jkaljundi 14y ago
Took me a while to understand this is not about the world's best mobile phone :)
hippich 14y ago
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.

111 points by kevindavis 14y ago

kevindavis 14y ago

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

brugidou 14y ago
Unfortunately i'm unable to use it on mobile :-(
Sujan 14y ago
Feedback to (imho) improve: 1. Mirror the top (prices) and bottom (description) 2. Add + sign between columns, = before last
malvim 14y ago
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.
- mfringel 14y ago
  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.
thenomad 14y ago
I was looking at this for video hosting costs - any chance the bandwidth slider could go a bit (well, a lot) higher?

B-Con 14y ago

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.

wallawe 14y ago
I was thinking the same thing. I've just started using S3 on a rails project for learning purposes and (I think) it's free for the amount of data I'm using. edit: props on the good work though!
a-priori 14y ago
The sliders should be on a log scale to accommodate both small and large users.
kevindavis 14y ago
Good point - I thought about this a bit and figured I could take one of a couple of approaches 1) log scale (probably a bit confusing / harder to implement) 2) a switch between personal and business (could do similar switches for other settings like region thoughts?
- joshstrange 14y ago
  How about if you could double click on the slider to enter your own exact value. Also maybe throw in a checkbox for reduced redundancy?
kmfrk 14y ago
Yeah. Especially for someone who hosts a static blog.
roywalker 14y ago
I think that adding some popular/pre-defined packages (that could change the slider's values) would help "regular" users. About the slider, the horizontal lines are useless without references.

neerajdotname2 14y ago

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

kevindavis 14y ago
https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing note, it was largely adapted from the pricing page on database.com
- niggler 14y ago
  This was a wholesale scrape: https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing/blob/master/public/images/dbdc-logo-reversed.png https://github.com/kevindavis/s3-pricing/blob/master/public/... Why do you have the database.com logo in your repo?
  - kevindavis 14y ago
    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!

rco8786 14y ago

Azure has had this pricing scale for a long time.

diego 14y ago

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

m-i 14y ago

Wow! S3 is really expensive.

toomuchtodo 14y ago
Expensive is relative. 12 cents/GB/month for %99.999999999 reliability is cheap in my opinion.
richardkeller 14y ago
Compared to what? I'm very curious to find out alternatives that are cheaper than Amazon.
- m-i 14y ago
  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.
  - justincormack 14y ago
    In what way is server pricing even comparable to S3? Or are you pricing up running openstack on Hetzner?
    - m-i 14y ago
      Whatever stack or solution you want. IMHO what matters is the monthly bill: everytime I tried to use something from Amazon, I ended up paying too much. Of course, this is all relative and very subjective :).
  - tillk 14y ago
    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. ;)

_suoiruc 14y ago

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

creativityhurts 14y ago
I think they are a bit more than just a reseller.
- _suoiruc 14y ago
  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?
  - andrewcooke 14y ago
    my dad loves dropbox. he would be lost with s3. for most people it's not "arguably value added"; it's the difference between possible and not. (another vote for a log scale (or something equivalent, like a separate "units" that sets the scale to 1s, 10s, 100s...). also, the tick marks should be on reasonable, round values)
    - _suoiruc 14y ago
      Right. And the topic of this thread is a price matrix for S3. Presumably your Dad is not going to be looking at it.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - andrewcooke 14y ago

mmahemoff 14y ago

"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-search http://ajaxian.com/archives/ajax-showcase-amazoncom-diamond-... - mentioned in May, 2005) Also surprising there's no affiliate programme for S3, coming from the mother of all affiliate programmes.

wtn 14y ago
If it was obvious how much it cost, fewer people would use it.

cdawzrd 14y ago

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.

kevindavis 14y ago

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

tnuc 14y ago

The sliders for Storage and Data transfer would be more helpful if I could choose lower value. More people work with Gigabytes than Terrabytes.

res0nat0r 14y ago

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

jkaljundi 14y ago

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

hippich 14y ago

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.