The price of AWS vs GitHub

2018-12-11 1 min read

    This is a bit of an odd comparison since they offer two very different services with very different cost models but it’s just incredible how much more expensive AWS is than GitHub. It makes sense that GitHub is significantly cheaper since it’s fundamentally just git hosting and it has virtually zero marginal costs to support new customers. AWS on the other hand is bills entirely based on usage and has to allocate the additional hardware for every customer and is definitely not zero marginal cost. Yet they’re both integral in the modern tech ecosystem and are used extensively by companies and startups.

    There’s nothing out of the ordinary here and it’s just useful to take a step back every once in a while and think about the tools and products we use, how they fit into our workflows, and how much we pay for each. In this case they’re both incredibly valuable to us yet one is orders of magnitude cheaper than the other.