title: Heroku + Paperclip + Amazon S3 - Pricing?
body: <p>Since Heroku is a read-only filesystem I can't use paperclip to store a small quantity of files on the server.  Database image storage is an option, but not particularly ideal since that may crank my client's DB size up from a few hundred KB to over the 5 MB 'free' shared DB limit (depending on size of images).</p>
  
  <p>That leaves Amazon S3 as a likely solution.  I understand that Heroku is hosted on EC2 (I believe?).  Amazon's pricing wording was a little bit confusing when referring to S3-EC2 file transfers.  If I have my client setup an S3 account and let them do file transfers to and from there, what is the pricing going to look like?</p>
  
  <p>Is it cheaper from an S3 point-of-view to to both upload and download data in the rails controllers, and then feed the data to the browser using send_file?  Or would it make more sense to just link straight to the image or pdf from the browser like normal?</p>
  
  <p>Would my client have to pay anything at all since heroku is hosted on Amazon?  I was looking for other questions related to this but there weren't any really straight answers concerning which parts of the file transfer would be charged for.</p>
  
  <p>I guess the storage would cost a little (hardly anything), but what about the bandwidth?  Thanks :)</p>