Thanks for the information! This is helpful. Given that I was pretty knowledgeable about most aspects of backing my data up to S3, it would have been pretty ha

Thanks for the information! This is helpful. Given that I was pretty knowledgeable about most aspects of backing my data up to S3, it would have been pretty hard to predict where the possibility for error would have been. I can't imagine hiring someone for 2hr to come and check my work, since they really would have had to be there for the entire process. It sounds like about 2-5 days of work to get someone to set all this up, but perhaps it's more like 1 day at a minimum. So somewhere between $800-4k for that. Later in our project we were running 5 S3 buckets with about 20 stakeholders uploading and downloading, so that could have easily been another 4 days of work. $800 would have been two years of what we were planning to pay Amazon. $4-8k would have been a major big-ticket item for us (even though, of course, that's the bill we ended up stuck with.) If I were to do it over again I don't think I'd be able to justify spending on a pro. I would definitely spend on someone to audit our expenses more carefully though.