Price of Google Cloud Storage Increasing

By Sachin Gupta, VP and GM, Google Cloud Infrastructure, Google Cloud

Over the past several years, Google Cloud has made significant investments in its infrastructure product portfolio.

We launched new Tau T2D VMs, which deliver 42% better price-performance vs. other leading cloud providers. We upgraded Cloud Storage to offer more flexibility to support customers’ enterprise and analytics workloads, with dual-region buckets and upcoming Turbo Replication. And we’ve delivered numerous improvements to our global network, including expansion to 29 cloud regions.

However, from conversations with customers, we’ve also learned we can do more to align our capabilities and pricing with their varied workloads. So, today, we are announcing we will adjust our infrastructure product and pricing structure to give customers more choice in how they pay for what they use alongside new, flexible SKUs with new product options and capabilities. These changes are designed to help ensure better product fit for our customers’ use cases across a wider array of workloads. They are also designed to better align with how other leading cloud providers charge for similar products, so customers can more easily compare services between leading cloud providers.

Some of these changes will provide new, lower-cost options and features for Google Cloud products. Other changes will raise prices on certain products. Ultimately, our goal is to provide more flexible pricing models and options for how customers are using our cloud services.

Here’s an overview of what customers can expect:

Which services are changing? What new services are being introduced?
We are changing prices for some storage, compute, and networking products. The changes provide customers with new ways to optimize their spending based on workload type and size, or data portability needs, as well as reducing costs on some services. Specific changes include:

Cloud Storage pricing changes for data mobility, including replication of data written to a dual- or multi-region storage bucket, and inter-region data access

Introduction of a new lower-cost archive snapshot option for Persistent Disk (PD), so that compliance/archiving use cases are charged less than compute-intensive DevOps workloads
New outbound data processing pricing for Cloud Load Balancing, in line with other leading cloud providers
New pricing for Network Topology, which will include Performance Dashboard within Network Intelligence Center at no additional charge

Will customers’ bills increase? Decrease?
The impact of the pricing changes depends on customers’ use cases and usage. While some customers may see an increase in their bills, we’re also introducing new options for some services to better align with usage, which could lower some customers’ bills. In fact, many customers will be able to adapt their portfolios and usage to decrease costs. We’re working directly with customers to help them understand which changes may impact them.

When will the new prices go into effect?
Today, we sent customers a 6-month notice on the price changes, which go into effect on October 1, 2022. Customers under existing commit contracts with a floating or fixed discount will not face any changes until renewal. Our goal is to help our customers manage any impact of these changes and allow time for them to adjust or modify their implementations.

What should customers do next?
There are a number of things customers can do to prepare for the changes:

Read through the Mandatory Service Announcement (MSA) sent on March 14.
Consider what actions, if any, they may want to take based on current storage, networking, and compute needs. Many of these changes may have simple choices associated with them.
Consider using the Storage Transfer Service to select the right Cloud Storage bucket locations. Storage Transfer Service will be available free-of-cost for transfers within Cloud Storage, starting April 2 until the end of the year.

For those customers under contract, Google Cloud account representatives are available to discuss these changes.Visit our pricing page and the links below for more details on the updates to storage, networking, and PD pricing, including information on how to modify your implementations if needed. If you do not have an account manager and still have questions please review our public FAQ, which will be updated regularly, as well as the resource links below.

Note: This pricing analysis is valid as of February 2022.

Resources:
Cloud Storage Pricing Announcements
Load Balancing Pricing Announcements
Network Intelligence Center Pricing Announcements
PD Pricing Announcements
Public FAQ