3 ms·

> Will customers’ bills increase? Decrease? The impact of the pricing changes depends on customers’ use cases and usage. While some customers may see an increas

by 015a 5y ago

> 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. There is a zero percent chance they haven't ran the analysis and concluded what % of customers would see a bill increase. It's high. If its low-to-zero, cloud companies are clear about how the prices are changing, and usually outline how many customers are would be negatively impacted. If it's high, they're ambiguous about what is changing, and shift the blame onto customers; if its still expensive for you, you're just not using it right.

dsr_ 5y ago
More specifically: if the majority of customers were going to see lower bills from Google, even if the top N% would see higher bills, you can bet that the headline would be "New pricing structure reduces bills for most customers".
- ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  You can definitely lie with statistics here. The "Always Free" egress change is probably going to mostly affect the large pool of free and near-free cloud users. So a very large number of people who "have Google Cloud accounts" may see costs go down. But the costs will go up for all the customers heavily investing in Google Cloud and using Google Cloud for storage of a lot of data. So the overall outcome will be more money for Google, in an update that claims a cost reduction for a large number of users.
ec109685 5y ago
They are expecting behavior to change based on the new prices, so that’s why they have to be vague and can’t precisely predict what the final cost will be to customers.
- acdha 5y ago
  That sounds like a PR statement: there’s no way they don’t know what the impact would be now and could make that clear by adding “at current usage” to any estimates. Put another way, if the cost was going down do you really think they’d avoid saying that because people might start to use more?
  - ec109685 5y ago
    I agree, if the cost was going down in more ways, they'd be more upfront about it.
bluedino 5y ago
> 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. So, your bill is going up.
williamstein 5y ago
> There is a zero percent chance they haven't ran the analysis and concluded what % of customers would see a bill increase. Zero percent is correct. I'm a GCP customer, and today I received an email from Google with a table explaining precisely how my bill would have changed, with columns labeled, e.g., "List Price $ increase in monthly bill due to data replication", and a corresponding dollar amount. My bill will increase by 5% overall if I don't make any changes.
twistedpair 5y ago
To be clear, looks like GCP is disincentivizing: - Using multi-regional storage (used to be a 30% premium, now much more) - Making lots of object writes (Class A) vs lots of reads (Class B) So, if you can: - Move to regional or dual-region (NAM4) storage - Snowball your writes into bigger overall objects, <3 immutability - Keep your data in the same region as access Then you can reduce the impact here. They are also closing the Coldline/Nearline loophole, where you could use a bucket lifecycle policy to keep your objects in Standard (cheap access) for a few weeks/months, and then move them to a cheap long term storage tier (Nearline/Coldline), because that move is another Class operation, that just got a lot more expensive. This is inline with two years ago when they quietly moved lifecycle operation pricing from the origin service tier (e.g. cheap Standard storage) to the destination tier (e.g. much more expensive Coldline), cutting down on the savings of tier jockeying.
- seiryth 5y ago
  This. It's using pricing as a user behaviour mechanism. I don't like the price increases either, but it's kind of clear they're trying to make sure multi region buckets aren't the default a user uses just because it's there. It costs gcp more to run this, and for most users multi regional doesn't make sense. Lots of enterprise orgs don't even use multi region because of either gdpr, or regional laws. The data has to either be classified as public/not sensitive for a real use case of it.

by 015a 5y ago

dsr_ 5y ago

More specifically: if the majority of customers were going to see lower bills from Google, even if the top N% would see higher bills, you can bet that the headline would be "New pricing structure reduces bills for most customers".

ocdtrekkie 5y ago
You can definitely lie with statistics here. The "Always Free" egress change is probably going to mostly affect the large pool of free and near-free cloud users. So a very large number of people who "have Google Cloud accounts" may see costs go down. But the costs will go up for all the customers heavily investing in Google Cloud and using Google Cloud for storage of a lot of data. So the overall outcome will be more money for Google, in an update that claims a cost reduction for a large number of users.

ec109685 5y ago

They are expecting behavior to change based on the new prices, so that’s why they have to be vague and can’t precisely predict what the final cost will be to customers.

acdha 5y ago
That sounds like a PR statement: there’s no way they don’t know what the impact would be now and could make that clear by adding “at current usage” to any estimates. Put another way, if the cost was going down do you really think they’d avoid saying that because people might start to use more?
- ec109685 5y ago
  I agree, if the cost was going down in more ways, they'd be more upfront about it.

bluedino 5y ago

> 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. So, your bill is going up.

williamstein 5y ago

> There is a zero percent chance they haven't ran the analysis and concluded what % of customers would see a bill increase. Zero percent is correct. I'm a GCP customer, and today I received an email from Google with a table explaining precisely how my bill would have changed, with columns labeled, e.g., "List Price $ increase in monthly bill due to data replication", and a corresponding dollar amount. My bill will increase by 5% overall if I don't make any changes.

twistedpair 5y ago

To be clear, looks like GCP is disincentivizing: - Using multi-regional storage (used to be a 30% premium, now much more) - Making lots of object writes (Class A) vs lots of reads (Class B) So, if you can: - Move to regional or dual-region (NAM4) storage - Snowball your writes into bigger overall objects, <3 immutability - Keep your data in the same region as access Then you can reduce the impact here. They are also closing the Coldline/Nearline loophole, where you could use a bucket lifecycle policy to keep your objects in Standard (cheap access) for a few weeks/months, and then move them to a cheap long term storage tier (Nearline/Coldline), because that move is another Class operation, that just got a lot more expensive. This is inline with two years ago when they quietly moved lifecycle operation pricing from the origin service tier (e.g. cheap Standard storage) to the destination tier (e.g. much more expensive Coldline), cutting down on the savings of tier jockeying.

seiryth 5y ago
This. It's using pricing as a user behaviour mechanism. I don't like the price increases either, but it's kind of clear they're trying to make sure multi region buckets aren't the default a user uses just because it's there. It costs gcp more to run this, and for most users multi regional doesn't make sense. Lots of enterprise orgs don't even use multi region because of either gdpr, or regional laws. The data has to either be classified as public/not sensitive for a real use case of it.