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On July 16, 2026 AWS removed the 30-day Standard residency gate for Standard-IA and One Zone-IA lifecycle transitions — day-0 IA can cut first-month storage ~46% on 10 TB cold logs, but the 30-day IA billing minimum and $0.01/GB retrieval fees still apply.
EBS is billed across six dimensions — gp3 storage at $0.08/GB-month, separate IOPS and throughput line items, io2 Block Express, snapshots at $0.05/GB-month, fast snapshot restore at $0.75/DSU-hour. Deleting an EC2 instance never stops the volume bill, and the gp2→gp3 migration is one of the cleanest 20% wins in cloud cost.
EFS Standard is $0.30/GB-month — over 13× S3 Standard. Standard-IA is 92% cheaper at $0.025; Archive is 99% cheaper at $0.0036. Elastic Throughput (the 2024 default) bills $0.03/GB read and $0.06/GB write per transfer. Throughput mode and storage class decisions, made once at provision time, control the bill more than any usage pattern.
As of July 2026, Lambda S3 Files still mounts S3 as POSIX via NFS — roughly S3 Standard storage rates vs EFS for large files — but versioning is required, IAM is s3files:*, capacity providers are incompatible, and a ~60s write-back window breaks naive ports.
S3 storage is still cheap in July 2026. Request storms, unmanaged versioning, CRR, Express One Zone, and S3 Tables compaction choices are what blow the bill — not GB-month alone.