The size of the volume discount (up to 60%) is pretty surprising. If they're making any money at 5.5 cents/GB then they must be making a lot of money at 14 cents.
I think once you factor in the costs related to creating and maintaining accounts (including support and billing) they aren't making much more off the small users than large ones, percentage-wise.
I wonder what kinds of things people are using this for, that they even explicitly mention a tier for 5 Petabytes. Thats like $275,000/month, not counting transfers.
Isn't DropBox in the 5 PB+ range? I have a vague recollection of concluding that they were in S3's top tier a few months ago, but I can't remember if it was based on them announcing how much data they were storing, based on an estimate from their burn rate, or based on an estimate from their number of users.
I worked out the first 5 PiB to be $462,336/month at the older pricing, and $433,433.60/month at the new rate.
Edit: fat-fingered a couple of columns. New figures are $449,536 and $433,423.36, for $16112.64/month savings, or 3.6%. All the savings come in the first 1 PiB.
Just in case I'm not the only person who was confused by this at first: stellar678 is referring to the free bandwidth between EC2 and S3, not the free AWS upload bandwidth (which no longer exists).
Marginally related trivia: Thanks to said free EC2-S3 bandwidth, if you want to move more than 1 MB between EC2 nodes in different availability zones, it's cheaper to PUT the data to S3 from one node and then GET and DELETE it from the other node than it is to transfer it directly.
