I received a delightful email from Amazon today:

Dear Amazon S3 Developers,

This is a note to inform you about some changes we're making to our pricing, effective June 1, 2007.

With Amazon S3 recently celebrating its one year birthday, we took an in-depth look at how developers were using the service, and explored whether there were opportunities to further lower costs for our customers. The primary area our customers had asked us to investigate was whether we could charge less for bandwidth.

There are two primary costs associated with uploading and downloading files: the cost of the bandwidth itself, and the fixed cost of processing a request. Consistent with our cost-following pricing philosophy, we determined that the best solution for our customers, overall, is to equitably charge for the resources being used - and therefore disaggregate request costs from bandwidth costs.

Making this change will allow us to offer lower bandwidth rates for all of our customers. In addition, we're implementing volume pricing for bandwidth, so that as our customers' businesses grow and help us achieve further economies of scale, they benefit by receiving even lower bandwidth rates. Finally, this means that we will be introducing a small request-based charge for each time a request is made to the service. Below are the details of the new pricing plan (also available on the Amazon S3 detail page):

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB - uploaded
$0.20 / GB - downloaded

New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB - all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge

New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Storage will continue to be charged at $0.15 / GB-month used.

The end result is an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our customers. If this new pricing had been applied to customers' March 2007 usage, 75% of Amazon S3 customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.

We don't anticipate making further structural changes to Amazon S3 pricing in the future, but we will continue to look for ways to drive down costs and pass the savings on to you. Sincerely,
The Amazon Web Services Team

P.S. Please note that the reduced bandwidth rates shown above will also take effect for Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS. The bandwidth tier in which you will be charged each month will be calculated based on your use of each of these services separately, and could therefore vary across services.

I'll say it again (and again): Amazon S3 is the most important thing to happen to the internet in quite some time. This change makes total sense, too. I'm sure they realized that the incoming requests (esp. if Amazon is returning with a Not-modified header) weren't netting them any $$$, which is why they're now charging $0.01 per 10K GET requests. Not a bad idea - it's effectively singling out the high-volume sites with lots of requests to S3 ... while lowering the cost for small-to-medium sized deployments (like Tabulas).

. . .

Speaking of technological achievements, I've been meaning to write about this for a while, but I keep forgetting.

The Bank of America ATMs have recently rolled out this wonderful deposit option to ATMs. In the past, if you wanted to make a deposit, you'd endorse your checks, drop them in an envelope, and wait for somebody else to do the deposits. Now, when you want to do a deposit, you actually feed in each individual check. The ATM scans an image of the check (which can be printed off as a receipt), automagically figures out the value of the check (wow!), and then deposits it for you. By the time I had gotten back to the office today, the check was already showing up in my BoA online account!

This is friggin' awesome, cause I always worried that depositing a check via ATM could potentially suck - what if the bank never got it? What record would I have? Likewise, I hate going into the bank to deposit a check - there's always a line to do something that could be automated. This new way gives me peace of mind AND efficiency, and that's what I like!

. . .

Fact: San Diego police WILL ticket you for jaywalking. $118. And they *do* have traffic enforcement cops working the 1am shift ... crazy! I just found out I have an unpaid ticket (must have blown off, cause I never got it) for parking in a "passenger-only" zone at 1am on Sunday morning. Give me a break.

I guess it's a good thing - the harsher police are on stupid offenses, the less they're battling with bigger crime problems ... right?