I think you might have glossed over this part of the article:
Glacier data retrievals are priced based on the peak hourly retrieval capacity used within a calendar month. You implicitly and retroactively“provision” this capacity for the entire month by submitting retrieval requests. My single 60GB restore determined my data retrieval capacity, and hence price, for the month of January, with the following logic:
- 60.8GB retrieved over 4 hours = a peak retrieval rate of 15.2GB per hour
- 15.2GB/hour at $0.011/GB over the 744 hours in January = $124.40
- Add 24% VAT for the total of $154.25.
- Actual data transfer bandwith is extra.
Had I initiated the retrieval of a 3TB backup this way, the bill would have been $6,138.00 plus tax and AWS data transfer fees
The bill wasn't $150 after he retrieved the full catalog, the bill was $150 when he was expecting it to be less than $1 based on the amount of data retrieved at that point. However, because the full-month price was based on a single peak retrieval, he could pull the entire music catalog without incurring extra fees once he worked out the bugs in the retrieval software. Even then, the bill was still 185 times higher than what he had expected based on a the simple pricing table.
The broader point being, before I was going to rely on any solution long-term for something like this, I'd want to test a couple of cycles of backup and restore to verify functionality, time to complete request, price, etc.