S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past

What happened

Developer Simon Willison published an analysis on September 27, 2026, mapping all historical price cut milestones and corresponding unit costs for AWS S3 since its 2006 launch. He found that after S3’s last price drop to $0.023 per GB-month in December 2016, it has not adjusted pricing for a full decade, breaking its earlier cadence of average price cuts every 1–2 years.

Key facts

Analysis publisher

Simon Willison

Analysis publication date

September 27, 2026

Initial S3 launch price

$0.15 per GB-month (2006)

Date of S3’s last price cut

December 1, 2016

Current S3 pricing

$0.023 per GB-month

Background

Over the first decade from S3’s 2006 launch to 2016, the service consistently cut storage unit prices at an average pace of one reduction every 1–2 years, leading the industry to broadly expect public cloud storage costs would keep falling as scale effects took hold.

Why it matters

This trend upends the longstanding industry norm of public cloud storage prices declining steadily with scale, signaling a shift in the storage pricing strategy of leading cloud providers. For developers relying long-term on S3, they can no longer expect the scale-driven price reduction benefits that once applied. End users may eventually see cost pass-through in the form of price hikes or reduced feature sets for cloud storage services.

In their words

“It’s notable that S3 used to cut prices fairly regularly, but it has now been a full decade without a single price reduction.”

Simon Willison, developer and tech blogger

What to watch

Going forward, watch for whether AWS adjusts S3 pricing, and whether competitors leverage this moment to launch higher cost-performance storage offerings to capture market share.