Agreed. Pricing transparency in healthcare has been wonderful for pricing (see The Atlantic's Fallow's article). My point was that pricing transparency is not

Agreed. Pricing transparency in healthcare has been wonderful for pricing (see The Atlantic's Fallow's article). My point was that pricing transparency is not a panacea. It seemed that some people were reacting as though pricing transparency is a magical salve. AWS: In my experience, AWS pricing has been transparent and great and they generally take steps to keep you from foot-gunning yourself. This article discusses a case in which the author foot-guns himself using a predictable mechanism AWS can't really prevent. I'm unsure of what else AWS could do to protect him from himself... (Anyone can throw out simple solutions without understanding S3's implementation complexity: they could seriously throttle their own product! ... but that might be seriously complicated and might hamper the value of the product to others. Besides, if you buy a M1A1 tank, you should be very careful about using it: it could use tons of fuel... He bought an M1A1, left the keys on the dash and then was surprised when he found got a huge fuel bill...).