Brand concludes that the S3 pricing scheme is expensive, and working out costs of transitioning objects between storage classes is frustrating. The main takeaway is that the important thing for keeping S3 costs as low as possible is not using it to store small objects. “By putting high price tags on metadata operations, AWS is severely penalising workloads consisting of numerous operations on small objects.” His recommendation is to keep your S3 stored objects 1MB in size or larger.