Google Announces ‘Significant Price Increases’ for Google Cloud’s Services

Google Cloud's services will be a lot more expensive in August.

Google recently announced that it would be doubling its price for some of Google Cloud's core services to provide "more flexible pricing models and options" to customers.

Google Cloud Price Increase Details

According to the company's announcement, it is changing the prices for some storage, compute, and networking products to provide customers new ways to "optimize spending" based on their workload type and size or data portability needs.

These increases will go into effect on October 1, 2022, with existing commit contracts with a floating or fixed discount not facing any charges until renewal. Google explained that it slated the price increase to October to help its customers manage any impact the changes would make and provide them with time to adjust or modify their implementations.

Specifically, Google increased the price of its Cloud Storage for data mobility, which includes data replication to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket and inter-region data access. It also increased the price for outbound data processing for Cloud Load Balancing, which is said to be in line with leading cloud providers.

Lastly, Google increased the price for Network topology, which would include Performance Dashboard within the Network Intelligence Center for free.

Google Cloud Pricing Details

As for their new pricing, Tech Crunch reports that the increase in Google's Cloud Storage Class A will double from $0.10 per 10,000 operations to $0.20. On the other hand, Google Cloud's Coldline Storage B operations will be priced at $0.10 per 10,000 operations instead of $0.05.

Meanwhile, Google Cloud's Load Balancing will have a new outbound data processing charge of $.008 to $0.012, depending on the region.

Lastly, Google Cloud's Network Topology visualization tool will have a price of $0.0011 per resource hour per Protocol.com.

New Additions

However, not everything about Google Cloud has an increased price. The company also provided a new lower-cost Persistent Disk archive snapshot option, which will include incremental chains, compression, and encryption. This new tool would allow for compliance or archiving use cases to be charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads.

Google also mentioned that it will also be raising its "Always Free Internet" egress from 1GB per month to 100GB per month.

Developers' Reaction

Some developers did not take Google's price increases lightly when it was announced. A YCombinator thread talking about Google Cloud's new pricing was filled with dismay towards Google's decision.

"This announcement is just an eyewash to hide the fact that they're doubling their pricing structure for some products," a YCombinator user said. "They claim most customers will see a cost increase."

Another YCombinator user commented that home hosting data is a better and cheaper alternative to Google Cloud.

However, many of its fellow Ycombinator users cautioned about hosting data at home for anything bigger than a personal website or a hobby, such as a business.