Never understood the point of these kinds of article -- why would you trust them? It is not much easier to read than offical AWS docs... and even if you read it all, you should still head over to AWS docs anyway because who knows when this article was written, which region was author looking at, and if the prices mentioned are still correct.

And finally, you don't want to calculate it by hand anyway, get one of the many AWS cost calculators.

I'm not sure what is surprising about any of the costs listed.

1. It's more expensive to use a faster data retrieval.

2. You get a per file retrieval fee, so make an archive if possible.

3. AWS charge you to move data out of AWS, but isn't this is true of all AWS services.

4. Glacier is long term archival storage, so if you make them delete a file within 90 days they will get a charge because you are putting work on them to maintain you putting files on tapes and then asking to wipe your files from the tape.

It's been a while since I've used the glacier page in the console, but I thought it used to warn you when you went to upload files that there is a fee if you try to delete before the 90 window is up.