Amazon Drops the Price for Simple Queue Service (SQS), but there are some Caveats

Amazon announced a new pricing model for their Simple Queue Service (SQS) today which looks much more reasonable than the old system.

Here are the pricing changes:

Previous Price (prior to February 6, 2008)

Messages

$0.10 per 1,000 messages sent ($0.0001 per message sent)

Data Transfer

$0.10 per GB—all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB—first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB—next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB—data transfer out / month over 50 TB

New Price (effective February 6, 2008)

Requests

$0.01 per 10,000 Amazon SQS requests ($0.000001 per request)

Data Transfer

Data transfer rates are unchanged. However, because many customers want to use Amazon SQS in conjunction with Amazon EC2, all data transferred between Amazon EC2 and Amazon SQS is free of charge.

So to get the benefits, you should use EC2 to get the free data transfer and second, poll the queue as little as possible (throttle back if the queue is empty and pick it up when there's stuff in it again).

Message Retention Time Changes

The message retention time has DECREASED from 15 days to 4 days. This is not a good thing.

Message Size Changes

The maximum message size has DECREASED from 256 KB to 8 KB for both Query and SOAP requests. Seriously?

Number of Messages Received

They've DECREASED the maximum number of messages you can receive in one request from 256 to 10. So now you have to make 25 requests (which cost money) to get what you could have got out of 1 request.

Conclusion

I've always had a problem with how SQS was priced. I had planned to use it for a service that uses high volume queues locally, but the pricing is just off the hook and didn't make any sense. I'm not sure if the new pricing will make that better or worse, but they've also decreased the functionality quite a bit.

It almost sounds like they are trying to sunset this service.

In any case, you have 180 days to switch to the new API folks, so get on it. For the Java folks out there, Typica is your best bet.