One of the best kept secrets at Pinata is that you might actually be able to save money compared to Amazon's AWS when you use us. Seems pretty dumb to keep that a secret. We should talk about it, so here you go.

At the base layer, Pinata is comparable to AWS S3. We are a file storage provider. Developers can upload files and retrieve files. Invariably, we all end up wanting the file retrieval part of the equation to be faster. This is where S3 struggles. Retrieving files from S3 directly is expensive and relatively slow.

Pinata gives you a built-in CDN out of the box. You don't have to set up an additional service or pay additional. It's all packaged up in your existing plan price so you don't ever have to think about it. With S3, you have to think. And you have to think hard.

Consider this pricing page for AWS's Cloudfront (the CDN most developers stick in front of their S3 buckets).

So, wait, how much will it cost?

There is a web application on AWS's site that allows you to calculate your bill. I went through the trouble of configuring this with the following details:

• us-east-1
• Cloudfront and S3 as the only services
• 500 GB stored on S3 monthly
• 1000 S3 operations of each variety for 2000 total
• 3TB of egress served to the internet from Cloudfront
• 5 million requests from Cloudfront

The price for S3 is pretty reasonable at $11.51.

But this assumes no egress from S3. Even with Cloudfront, there will be some egress from the S3 origin in order to cache the data on Cloudfront, but we're going to just ignore that for simplicity. Let's now take a look at Cloudfront's costs. (Note that Cloudfront provides 1TB free, so I’m only pricing out 2 additional TB of egress)

The price there comes to $179.08.

So all combined, we're looking at a bill of $190.59 per month. You can see the assumptions and calculations here.

Let's compare that to Pinata. Pinata's Fiesta Plan is $100/month as a based and includes:

• 2.5TB storage
• 5 million requests
• 2.5TB of bandwidth
  • Extra bandwidth is billed at $0.08/GB

Our usage, as calculated within the AWS services, almost falls within what's included in the Fiesta Plan on Pinata. The only thing we need is an extra 500GB of bandwidth to get us up to the 3TB of egress usage. Based on the overage price, that would cost $40 extra.

That means, the total bill from Pinata would come to $140.

$50.59 cheaper than AWS, and you didn’t need to hire a devops team to manage it.

We always focus on the developer experience because we believe Pinata's experience is significantly better and will save you time and headache. However, despite our hesitation to promote Pinata as the cheaper alternative (because honestly, you should want to pay for high quality), we actually can be cheaper depending on the services you use.

If you're ready for a better experience, better customer support, and potentially some extra money in your wallet, check out Pinata today.