The important revenue growth comes from new customers and new workloads. You mention inflation as if it is a meaningful driver of increased revenue, but AWS has never raised its prices for any service AFAIK. Growth is 100% driven by increased usage.
AWS is a shared service, so as they add more customers, the overhead costs of administering the service continue to drop. Their priority is to keep growth going at a steady clip.
AWS is also a very granular service, so Amazon gets near real-time metrics re: usage, demand, etc for a variety of services. That allows them to analyze changes in usage patterns and correlate price signals to actual consumption of services.
My guess is they adjust their pricing to control growth. Too cheap, and demand will spike, requiring Amazon to grow the environment too quickly. Too expensive, and they'll have trouble making the continuous capital investments that they need to make while still making money!
Many enterprise care more about the risk of prices changing than the absolute prices. The later you can account for in budgets more easily than the former. Especially if the price increase is one that goes from $0 to $non-zero since that could be a massive increase in absolute dollars.
AWS has never afaik increased prices which is a pretty strong selling point even if specific services likely are a loss for them perpetually as a result if mis-priced initially.
I run at AWS for 5 years and use more than 25 services and keep an eye at a huge sum very carefully year never seen this happening so it's pretty extraordinary for me. I dont ever remember AWS increasing prices for any service at all.
At the scale that AWS operates, if they raise their prices 1% they lose some measurable percentage of their sales in response. It's not a given that raising the price raises the profits. I wouldn't be surprised if their pricing is already optimized.
Increasing uptake of their higher margin products, mostly.
What products of theirs have seen prices rise? I can't think of any, except some AWS services where the price rise accompanies a serious rise in utilisation (ie the user is getting more per dollar, so the dollar price is rising commensurate)
I track AWS pricing for a living. I’ve never yet seen a price for a released service increase; they have historically only gone down.
That said, the cost of the data itself is going to likely drive where you go. Porting functions to another provider is likely to be a challenge; each implementation has special unicorn warts to it.
AWS has never increased prices though, like since they started. Atleast I can't find any references to any price increase.
The link showing "price/performance ratio for newer instances is rising" is deceptive. It just shows vcpu/hour, which doesn't really measure real world performance. Like m5.large is a significant performance improvement over m4.large. Newer instances also carry improvements not shown in the link.
How AWS pricing works in practice is complicated, which is the problem I was trying to illustrate. It's mostly based on usage/capacity, but hopefully for a SAAS product, the demand for chargeable AWS resources is strongly correlated with levels of user engagement and that in turn with levels of revenue.
I don't think AWS has ever raised prices. Generally for a given service, prices are fixed and they'll either release a new version or a new machine generation with new pricing (and the old version usually has a very generous deprecation window).
AWS pricing can be confusing but they also offer significantly more services. I think it'd be more straight forward if they had the same number of products as Digital Ocean. Afaik they bill for the same things.
Universally everyone understands "raising prices" to be - "raising prices without any customer action".
As in you consider your options, take into consideration pricing, design your architecture, you deploy it, and you get a bill. Then suddenly, later, without any action of your own, your bill goes up.
THAT is raising prices, and it is something AWS has essentially never done.
What you're describing is a situation where a customer CHOOSES to upgrade to a new generation of instances, and in doing so gets a larger bill. That is nowhere near the same thing.
I am unaware of the specific verticals in which AWS is increasing their revenue growth; maybe they don’t go head the to head with Cloudflare there. For AWS to predate on pricing against Cloudflare would imply reducing the pricing for all existing customers too and that would be a significant amount of money left in the table.
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