Comment by stefan_
4 years ago
If you ask the fancy restaurant to cater a steak dinner for 1000 people they will charge you a lot closer to supermarket beef.
The point is that if you charge absurd prices for what has basically no marginal cost your pricing model is broken and 1) you are excluding customers that are particularly sensitive to this price or 2) you are liable to undercharge other customers that primarily use other services for which you are not charging what it costs you to provide.
For AWS, given the generally inflated prices, it's probably a lot more of 1) than 2).
As I explained in another commented AWS wants to disincentivize dumb bandwidth usage. They want you to use your bandwidth for traffic that needs it to EC2, and you get much better rates for static data from CDNs, S3, etc.