Amazon S3 Customers Now Benefit From Economies of Scale

Amazon has introduced a tiered pricing scheme for S3, its cloud storage service, that will take advantage of increasing economies of scale and go into effect November 1st.

Currently, American customers pay $0.15 for each gigabyte of data they store each month. With the new scheme, this will remain the price only for users who require less than 50 terabytes of storage. Once demands exceed that level, pricing drops to $0.14 and then $0.13 per gigabyte-month, and then settles at $0.12 for customers who need to storage over 500 terabytes of data.

Data transfer costs remain unaffected, as do those of simply making requests to S3. A similarly tiered scheme for storage will be made available to European customers, with pricing starting at $0.18 per gigabyte-month.

As part of the pricing announcement, Amazon has revealed that S3 currently stores over 29 billion objects with peak usage rates of 70,000 storage, retrieval and deletion requests per second.