And the CFO Wept

For eight years, I’ve watched the same story play out: excited newcomers sign up for AWS thinking they have a free account, only to get blindsided by unexpected charges.

Well, the internet did what the internet does best this week: it collectively lost its mind over a number in an S-1 filing. Figma disclosed they signed a ~$550 million contract with AWS, someone used arithmetic (the secret weapon of Cloud Finance) to determine that this was roughly $300,000 per day on AWS, and suddenly everyone with a social media account became a cloud economics expert.

In short: Amazon’s Aurora DSQL is a technical marvel, but its pricing is absolutely baffling. And I mean just that. They’re not gouging customers. It’s not unfair. How they arrived at their pricing makes sense given the product’s development constraints (presumably including things such as “thou shalt not lose us our corporate ass on this service, as we cannot make it up in volume”). It’s just monumentally confusing.