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> it does it by reselling S3 at 10x the cost.

Github resells a free product with a fancy UI. Stripe resells visa and mastercard by adding a 5x surcharge to card transactions. Steam resells stripe by adding a 30x markup on that (it doesn't, it uses worldpay but the point stands). Calendly resells an open calendar for $12/month.

This is a reductive argument that doesn't really show why people pay for services. Tarsnap doesn't resell S3 at a 10x markup, it sells a backup service for $0.25/GB/month.

That said,

> it does it by renting a single EC2 server that will bring the service down if it needs to reboot

Yeah, and honestly it's pretty unbelieveable that there's not _two_ servers.



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