Amazon Stock Down 5% As High Prices Slow AWS Growth

Amazon’s profit engine is slowing down as rival cloud players are growing fast. My interviews with two upstarts — Wasabi Technologies and Sushi Cloud — suggest that AWS is overcharging as slowing economic growth pressures customers to reduce their costs.

AWS’s profitability depends on how well it can lock customers in, sell them more services, and make it expensive for them to leave. Fortunately for customers, upstarts are offering excellent point solutions for specific services — such as storage and compute — at prices low enough to more than offset AWS’s high switching costs.