> Thankfully, Google’s pricing is very transparent and simple to work with, so we can use Spotify’s blog posts to calculate some list pricing for what Spotify m

> Thankfully, Google’s pricing is very transparent and simple to work with, so we can use Spotify’s blog posts to calculate some list pricing for what Spotify might be paying Google. The biggest way in which all such assumptions are likely to be wrong is that they overlook the likelihood that Spotify has been offered a potentially substantial discount in exchange for attempting to win their business, and to be an early adopter. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's something to take into account while evaluating what you think Spotify might be paying. Many cloud service providers offer a discount to, for example, qualified startups participating in certain accelerators. In the same fashion, it would not be surprising for a provider to entice a major potential user and hopeful net promoter with a significant price reduction as well as other perks, such as more access to senior people for operations support, as well as influence on the roadmap. So while I think this blog post could plausibly estimate what a typical customer with Spotify's usage pattern might pay, assuming the estimates are correct (I haven't checked the details), one cannot draw conclusions about what they're likely to actually be paying. [Edit: I see now that the article recognizes this at the bottom. At the time I made my comment, it seemed to have been overlooked in the discussion here, where only one comment acknowledged it and the rest seemed to discuss the numbers as factual and face-value: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11242166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11242166 ]