Funny, I've been thinking about a startup that would hold several gigs of data per user (the first set of data would live on S3.) First thing I did was write

Funny, I've been thinking about a startup that would hold several gigs of data per user (the first set of data would live on S3.) First thing I did was write a simple monte-carlo code to determine the average and +- 1\sigma cost per user. Proud of myself, I showed my analysis to some business types who told me I was wasting my time when I should be building a product instead :) Nevertheless, I believe the exercise was useful. I now have a fairly clear picture of how much it directly costs to serve a user.