Amazon has launched a new low-cost storage service called Amazon Glacier. The company says it’s optimized for data that is infrequently accessed, and for which retrieval times of several hours are suitable, in order to keep costs low.

Glacier comes with a pay-for-what-you-need model, and customers can store data for $.01 per gigabyte per month. The monthly bill is based on the amount of data stored and transferred.

Upload and retrieval requests cost $0.050 per 1,000 requests. LISTVAULTS, GETJOBOUTPUT, DELETE and all other Requests are free. Data Retrievals are free. Here’s a closer look at the data transfer pricing:

“Companies typically over-pay for data archiving,” the company says. “First, they’re forced to make an expensive upfront payment for their archiving solution (which does not include the ongoing cost for operational expenses such as power, facilities, staffing, and maintenance). Second, since companies have to guess what their capacity requirements will be, they understandably over-provision to make sure they have enough capacity for data redundancy and unexpected growth.”

“This set of circumstances results in under-utilized capacity and wasted money,” Amazon adds. “With Amazon Glacier, you pay only for what you use. Amazon Glacier changes the game for data archiving and backup as you pay nothing upfront, pay a very low price for storage, and can scale your usage up or down as needed, while AWS handles all of the operational heavy lifting required to do data retention well. It only takes a few clicks in the AWS Management Console to set up Amazon Glacier and then you can upload any amount of data you choose.”

Data in Glacier are stored as archives, which can be single files or combined files. You can use the AWS Management Console (or the Glacier APIs) to create vaults to organize archives.

Glacier is, of course, designed for use with other Amazon Web Services. Users can import/export data into Glacier, and Amazon says that in the coming months, Amazon S3 will introduce an option to allow you to move data between S3 and Glacier using data lifecycle policies.