It must, but I assume once you get to a certain level of usage then an account manager / AWS gets you a slightly better than the publicly published deal. Is that the case?

Also, I wonder if EC2 is up for a price tweak soon too?

EDIT: Ah - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7475284

If you have a direct-billed account, and are spending more than 1,000/month, you'll get an automatic price break. At my current $DAYJOB, we're billing around $15-20K/month (depending on traffic) in Amazon Web Services charges, and I believe we're getting somewhere between a 10 and 25 percent price break.

Yes, the big users have negotiated lower prices that aren't listed on the site (confirmed to me by a very large S3 user).

I remember reading a while ago that Imgur uses Edgecast as their CDN and not Cloudfront. See: http://readystate4.com/2012/08/14/great-post-on-imgurs-stack...

My guess is that they are only using AWS for serving the site and handling the uploads, resizing etc. and they are using another provider for the storage of the images (or they are just directly hosting everything with Edgecast and not using them in Pull mode).

Like people have mentioned above, you can get a bunch of dedicated servers with heaps of storage for a fraction of the price of S3. You loose the flexibility and instant scaling, but the fact is these servers would be used more of a backup and would only be hit by Edgecast to upload them to the CDN.

Dropbox doesn't pay the rates you see on the S3 pricing page. They currently pay lower than $0.03/GB.

I hope we see a price reduction for the 100gb @ $10/month account, for something closer to $5/month

I would be surprised if they didn't reduce their prices, there have been too many competitive storage pricing reductions recently for them not to.

Is Dropbox not having a $5/month plan a decision based on storage pricing?

A reduction in the cost of goods sold does incentivise businesses to apply price discrimination without a negative impact on margins - a $5/month service would target a big, untouched, monetisable market.

I wonder if any company using that much S3 space wouldn't have already negotiated a better deal, possibly beating these prices.

Benefit to them, doubt we'll ever see the savings in the case of Dropbox