Renting cloud infrastructure typically gets cheaper over time, but Google Cloud is bucking this trend today with significant price increases across a number of core services. These increases, which Google announced under the guise of wanting to provide “more flexible pricing models and options,” will go into effect on October 1, 2022. Most developers are not amused.
It’s not all bad news, with some archive storage at rest in Google’s U.S., Europe and Asia regions decreasing in price, and there’s a new lower-cost Persistent Disk archive snapshot option, too. The company is also raising its “Always Free Internet” egress from 1 GB per month to 100 GB per month.
But a number of core storage features, like multi-region Nearline storage, will see increases of 50%. Operations pricing for Google Cloud’s Coldline Storage Class A will double from $0.10 per 10,000 operations to $0.20. And while reading data in a Cloud Storage bucket located in a multi-region from a service in a region on the same continent was previously free, it’ll now be priced just like any other data movement between Google Cloud locations on the same continent.
Load balancing, too, will see a price increase now that Google applies an “outbound data processing charge” of $0.008 to $0.012, depending on the region. Ticketmaster would be proud, but Google says this will align its pricing with other leading cloud providers.
“Google Cloud offers innovative solutions to transform businesses, priced in a customer-focused and consistent way. With our pay-as-you-go pricing structure, customers have the ability to better match costs to the services they use. Customers can also more easily compare services between leading cloud providers,” the company wrote in an FAQ today.
The marketing teams of the other leading cloud providers are probably having a field day with this announcement, but moving large amounts of data is hard. There’s a reason people talk about data gravity. That’s one area where you can maybe raise prices without having to fear an exodus of customers.
Despite the flowery language in the announcement, Google is clearly aware of the impact these changes will have. Why else would its FAQ note that its customers should “adapt their current usage to better align their applications to these new business models and help mitigate some of the price changes,” after all?
Google — and Google Cloud especially — already suffers from the perception that it will shut down services almost randomly, even though its customers depend on them. Now add to that the perception that it will randomly hike its prices, and its sales teams will likely have to work overtime to fulfill the ambitious growth goals the company has surely set for itself.
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