Storage and Bandwidth Cost Over time.

A lot of people likes to use the above graph and article to show how hard drive continue to fall. If you Zoom out over long enough period of course if will look fine. But if we look from 2013, where HDD price was slightly bumped up due to Thailand flooding, we saw price /GB went from $0.04 to $0.015 in 10 years time. Now if we Look at 2016, we reach roughly $0.025 to $0.015 in 7 years. We reached $0.02 in 2019.

Or another way to look at it, it took us 3 years to half the cost per GB from 09 to 11. Took another 4 years to half the price from 11 to 15. Took 5 years to half again to 2020.

So from 2009 to 2023, over 14 years. The price went from $0.115 to $0.015. About 8x Reduction.

Compare this to bandwidth in 2021 [2]:

During the last ten years, industry wholesale transit prices have fallen an average of 23% annually. Compounded over that time, wholesale bandwidth is 93% less expensive than 10 years ago.

The bandwidth price actually fall faster in earlier years, but even using the same 23% annual reduction, over the same 14 years period bandwidth would cost 97.5% less, or 40x Reduction.

It is worth pointing out that bandwidth average pricing is already taking into account places which have stubborn business practice or regulation that makes prices so much higher than the west. Compared to Storage price where everyone in the market paid roughly the same.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
[2] https://blog.cloudflare.com/aws-egregious-egress/