We have used S3 successfully several times. You can create a Maven repository, use it as RPM repo and many other use cases to host artifacts. I am not sure what functionality is missing that cannot be implemented on the top of S3 and requires CodeArtifact.
For maven, to push artifacts via the correct mvn deploy:deploy-file requires a S3 wagon (transport layer) software to actually make the S3 calls. For bigger orgs, having everyone use a wagon is a non-starter.
All I'm seeing this does is give the proper http endpoints so you dont need the wagon. Is it worth ~2x the price, no, but it's better than the other enterprise-y solutions.
