I've been thinking about this.
The prices are often based on salaries in highly paid countries.
My country (The Netherlands) is far from poor, don't get me wrong, but we make WAY less than some developers in the United States make.
If a US developer makes $120k and a service costs them $30 monthly it doesn't seem like a big deal.
That same service can effectively be 3 times more expensive if you make a third of what the US dev makes.
Should SaaS / PaaS / etc. have purchasing power parity? (PPP)
Top comments (3)
I think a tremendously small portion of AWS' ~$46 billion in revenue would come from individual people. The vast majority is from bigger organizations, so the pricing strategy will be geared around that.
Given that organizations can vary enormously in their financial power, I don't think it makes sense to vary pricing along geographic lines, when some organizations have 1000s or millions of times the financial resources of others.
One thing I would like to note is that salary != purchasing power.
One of the reasons that developer salaries are often higher in the US is because the cost of living there is higher (especially when talking about the Bay Area).
Just find some AWS credits on ebay