3months is only if you use standard S3, However intelligent tiering , infrequent access , reduced redundancy or glacier instant can be substantially cheaper, without impacting retrieval time [1]
At scale when costs matter, you would have lifecycle policy tuned to your needs taking advantage of these classes. Any typical production workload is hardly paying only S3 base price for all/most of its storage needs, they will have mix of all these too.
[1] if there is substantial data in glacier regular, the costing completely blows through the roof, retrieval +egress makes it infeasible unless you activily hate AWS enough to spend that kind of money
At scale when costs matter, you would have lifecycle policy tuned to your needs taking advantage of these classes. Any typical production workload is hardly paying only S3 base price for all/most of its storage needs, they will have mix of all these too.
[1] if there is substantial data in glacier regular, the costing completely blows through the roof, retrieval +egress makes it infeasible unless you activily hate AWS enough to spend that kind of money