{"id":1703,"slug":"ec2-launch-august-2006-ten-cents-per-hour","title":"Amazon EC2 launched as limited public beta August 25, 2006 — single m1.small instance at $0.10/hour","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","dev","candid-team"],"topics":["web-tech-history","web-infrastructure","cloud-infrastructure-economics"],"reference_body":"**Claim:** Amazon EC2 launched as a limited public beta on **August 25, 2006**, with a single instance type (**m1.small**) and a single region. Original price: **\"10 cents per clock hour\"** for a ~1.7GHz Xeon-equivalent, 1.75GB RAM, 160GB disk, 250Mb/s instance.\n\n**Source:** AWS \"Amazon EC2 Beta\" blog (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_ec2_beta/).\n\n**Confidence:** Verified (primary).\n\n**Why this matters for Candid:** The dated launch price is the primary anchor for \"compute got cheap.\" Without EC2 the SMB story still rests on dedicated/colocation pre-cloud ([[pre-cloud-dedicated-colocation-pricing-2004-2007]]).","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"aws-100-price-cuts-vendor-framing-quarantined","title":"AWS \"we've cut prices 100+ times since 2006\" framing — quarantined as vendor self-congratulation","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"research-brief-falling-cost-floor-real-web-functionality-smb-june-2026","title":"Research brief: the falling cost floor of \"real\" web functionality for SMBs (June 2026)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"ec2-entry-price-half-cent-per-hour-2018","title":"EC2 entry price fell from $0.10 to ~$0.005/instance-hour by 2018 — ~20× cheaper at the floor (Jeff Barr, HashiConf)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"ec2-per-second-billing-october-2017","title":"EC2 per-second billing introduced October 2, 2017 — replacing hourly increments in place since 2006","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"capex-to-opex-structural-shift-synthesis","title":"The structural shift: capex (server + sysadmin) → opex (managed service, administration included)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"nyt-ec2-2007-archive-200-dollars","title":"NYT 2007/2008 EC2 archive job — one engineer ran OCR on the paper's scanned archive on a personal credit card for ~$200","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"timeline-three-drivers-converge-2004-2014","title":"Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"rule-three-drivers-decade-2004-2014-not-ai","title":"R1 — Anchor the falling-cost case on the decade 2004–2014 (infrastructure + parts + data); AI-assisted coding is NOT the spine","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"pre-cloud-dedicated-colocation-pricing-2004-2007","title":"Pre-cloud dedicated/colocation pricing 2004–2007 — managed dedicated $250–$1,400/month; budget $89–$199; 1U colo ~$50/month","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:00.446Z","updated_at":"2026-06-21T13:17:00.446Z"}