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** Note that it does not include the initial fee for moving all the 44M objects to INT of about $400 (through a lifecycle transition), once an object is in INT there are no fees for other transitions. Additionally in order to detect UNLINKED file handles we use a few additional services heavily, such as kinesis firehose to stream data to S3, Athena for querying, Step Functions to orchestrate and EventBridge for triggering periodically. The service that is most expensive is kinesis firehose as we are pushing a lot of data through, checking the billing for the last few months though this adds up to a few tens of dollars so we excluded it from the estimates, see the cost explorer for kinesis.
It is clear that just moving everything to INT is cost effective for our use case where our access patterns are unknown since we have data that even if still linked is rarely accessed (e.g. older projects, older versions of entities, older tables, messages etc). On top of it, archiving unlinked data might be worth it even though the cost savings is not comparable to just using the INT storage class, we have around 1TiB of data each month in average that gets unlinked.
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