Comment by hnlmorg

S3 is actually quite expensive compared to the competition for both storage costs and egress costs. At a previous start-up, we had terrabytes of data on S3 and it was our second largest cost (after GPUs) and by some margin.

For small scale stuff, S3s storage and egress charges are unlikely to be impactful. But it doesn’t mean they’re cheap relative to the competition.

There are also ways you can reduce S3 costs, but then you're trading the costs received from AWS with the costs of hiring competent DevOps. Either way, you pay.