I think staying in such a financially hostile environment is misguided, irrespective of whether we reduce our overall storage requirements or not. The egress quirk at AWS S3 is egregious at best.
In general, I think we should pay for our mission-critical infrastructure, and that means finding a sustainable partner.
The best idea to tackle the immediate problem, I find, is Backblaze B2 and their egress fee waiver, if you transfer more than 10 TB and stay for at least 12 months. Their overall storage cost is also much lower and egress costs to Fastly don’t exist, because both of them are part of the bandwidth alliance.
Also, I really wish we had two threads, one for solving the immediate problem, and one for discussing long-term solutions. This thread is really long and noisy, and lacks coherence because of that.