It's a lot, yes, but you're getting a lot more than just the instance: - You can back up the image with fantastic reliability and recover into multiple AZs auto

It's a lot, yes, but you're getting a lot more than just the instance: - You can back up the image with fantastic reliability and recover into multiple AZs automatically with an autoscaling group for practically peanuts. - You can place that instance into your own private VPC complete with security groups (stateful firewall), Network ACLs, and inter/intra AWS routing. - You get strong authentication and RBAC through IAM over the instance and it's environment. That's what I consider in the "free or nearly free" tier, off hand. The other benefits come with being able to interface seamlessly and quickly (same infrastructure) to the rest of AWS services. You might do better at finding a piece of hardware that does that (and I'm curious now what a 2TB RAM server goes for) but I think you'd be hard pressed to find a way to start from scratch to deploy that instance and all of the services that come with it for under that price. People with on-prem compute likely have some of that already, but the value here is that you could request an X1 today without ever having been a customer before, and you'll get all of that, and access to more, just with that one instance. If that's not a good value proposition today, then I'd say wait just a few months. Today probably marks the highest price anyone will ever see for an X1. Given past history, it's just going to go downhill from here.