Amazon S3 launched March 14, 2006 at $0.15/GB — object storage as a metered utility
Created 2026-06-21
Summary
Claim: Amazon S3 launched March 14, 2006 with an initial price of $0.15/GB, establishing object storage as a metered pay-as-you-go utility.
Source: AWS "Twenty years of Amazon S3" blog (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/).
Confidence: Verified.
Why this matters for Candid: The dated launch price is the primary figure in any "storage got cheap" claim. The current price (S3 Standard ~$0.023/GB in 2025/2026 (first 50TB), tiering to $0.021/GB) and the magnitude drop (S3 storage cost fell ~85% from launch — ~7× more data for the same dollar; independently corroborated) follow from this anchor. Part of Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap.
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- reference Research brief: the falling cost floor of "real" web functionality for SMBs (June 2026) relates-to
- reference S3 Standard ~$0.023/GB in 2025/2026 (first 50TB), tiering to $0.021/GB relates-to
- reference S3 storage cost fell ~85% from launch — ~7× more data for the same dollar; independently corroborated depends-on
- reference The structural shift: capex (server + sysadmin) → opex (managed service, administration included) relates-to
- reference NYT 2007/2008 EC2 archive job — one engineer ran OCR on the paper's scanned archive on a personal credit card for ~$200 relates-to
- reference Timeline 2004–2014: the decade when each of the three historically-expensive parts independently got cheap depends-on
- rule R1 — Anchor the falling-cost case on the decade 2004–2014 (infrastructure + parts + data); AI-assisted coding is NOT the spine depends-on
- reference Pre-cloud dedicated/colocation pricing 2004–2007 — managed dedicated $250–$1,400/month; budget $89–$199; 1U colo ~$50/month relates-to
- reference Ruby on Rails open-sourced July 2004 (DHH from Basecamp); v1.0 December 2005 — convention-over-configuration relates-to
- reference Django created 2003 at Lawrence Journal-World; released publicly 2005 — "batteries-included," built-in admin/auth/ORM relates-to