Driven by the fact that using comparative adjectives in this context seems to be at best confusing, I thought I'd play around with some numbers to see if I coul

Driven by the fact that using comparative adjectives in this context seems to be at best confusing, I thought I'd play around with some numbers to see if I could understand what the author was trying to convey. First, it's important to clarify why comparative adjectives don't work here. Look at the following sentence. - A $5 cookie is worth twice as much as a $2.50 cookie Here, we establish the baseline (the $2.50 cookie), and express how much better the $5 cookie is. We could also say the inverse: - A $2.50 cookie is worth half as much as a $5 cookie. What we can't do is the following: - A $5 cookie is double more expensive than a $2.50 cookie. We can make a statement (the cookie is more expensive), or share the factor by establishing the baseline (twice as expensive as), but not both at the same time. The author tries to say 440% cheaper, (not mentioning storage or transfer) and I believe their logic was something along the lines of the below: - 440% = 440/100 - Cheaper = Reciprocal of More expensive - 440% cheaper = 1 / (440/100) = 100/440 - S3 is very difficult to estimate a 'per GB price' because it depends on where the data is being transferred to, various pricing tiers (S3, S3 intelligent, 'Glacier', 'infrequent access', 'One Zone', first 100GB free, egress through Cloudfront, and HTTP verb specifics). Fortunately, they have an estimate calculator, which gave me 9 USD for 100GB transferred out to the internet, or 0.09USD/GB for transfer. - Storage is a different proposition, with Amazon telling me it'll cost 2.30 USD for 100GB as long as I never look at it (ie: 0.023USD/GB) - Backblaze is much easier to reckon with, with $0.005/GB for storage, and $0.01 for transfer. - Therefore, for transfer Amazon's 0.09 * (100/440) = 0.02, which is MORE than Backblaze would charge me. - For storage, Amazon's 0.023 * (100/440) is indeed 0.005. So, Backblaze does indeed seem to be [440%, reciprocal of more expensive] as Amazon for storage cost alone.