There is some speculation that Amazon will follow cloud computing platform giants like Microsoft and IBM in raising the prices customers pay for their services. However, others suggest that Amazon will hold back.
Some of the confusion lies in Microsoft and IBM slashing prices of some of their services, like Amazon did in the past. In fact, Amazon was the leader in making prices lower for customers (launching roughly 40 cuts without ever seeing competition). This has led insiders to question if now that Amazon’s competitors are raising cloud prices, will Amazon as well.
Contributors to CIO.com think Amazon may refrain from raising prices simply due to their business model: providing lower prices than anyone. One look at Amazon’s financial records will show that they have the margins to avoid raising prices—at least for now.
As Fortune points out:
“This illustrates the problem with cloud price comparisons. Figuring out real cost is extremely difficult given the number of options — compute instance sizes, memory, storage etc. available and the fact that some vendors include services in base price that others do not.”