Ask HN: What is stopping AWS from raising prices? A common silicon valley move is to acquire a ton of users with a low priced product, then slowly keep raising the price over time to increase profitability. With so many companies deeply entrenched with AWS, what happens if they do this? Its not like netflix where you can just cancel it if the price raises too much |
amazon ruthlessly drives down costs because they know the moment they leave the door open too far, someone will eventually come in and supplant them
an example is how SQS has gotten 99% cheaper since it launched
bezos is the one who said "your margin is my opportunity"
they can one day turn around and start cranking up prices but this is how the last generation of companies (Oracle, IBM, etc) died
The fastest way to convince developers to abandon or avoid services is to start price gouging.
Assuming they did this (and I'm talking 'add a zero to their pricing,' not 'a 5% bump'), it'd juice their revenue for a couple of years and then it would plummet as folks migrated to more economical / trustworthy options.
The cost that Amazon charges for all the extraneous services is priced exactly at the point where someone would rather pay those costs rather than pay developers to go implement them on EC2s.