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BigQuery prices increasing by more than 100% for many users
- rhacker 4y agoLike big oil, it sounds like there is enough "infrastructure" out there that allows them to move the price fixing to third party companies that "recommend" prices for stuff.
- js4ever 4y agoIt's interesting to see GCP raise prices when AWS constantly do the opposite
- kdamica 4y agoAnnual flat rate plan is going from 2.3c per slot hour to 4.8c. On demand pricing increasing by 25%. Seems like they are trying to squeeze the users who are most locked in.
- makestuff 4y agoThat always seemed like the long term play to me for GCP. They were beating AWS/Azure on price but it wasn't profitable. All of the companies who signed up for GCP were incredibly short-sighted if they thought those prices would last forever. What option do you have though? Migrating off of BigQuery would likely take months for any decent sized deployment.
- re-thc 4y agoConsidering GCP is still a distant 3rd, I would have thought they'd aim to get more market share 1st :( BigQuery was 1 of the main reasons anyone would use GCP.
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoDoes aws not have something similar?
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoBigQuery is much, much better than Redshift. Mind you, both of them are worse than Snowflake, but not everyone has a spare child to offer up to get Snowflake discounts ;)
- LunaSea 4y agoWouldn't Athena be the service closest to BigQuery?
- disgruntledphd2 4y agoI don't really know, tbh. I've been at Snowflake shops for a long time now, but from a quick overview it looks like the serverless part is Athena, so like BQ in that sense (and SF also). But given that Athena uses HiveQL for DDL I'm gonna stand by my original statement.
- krferriter 4y agoYes, Athena is the serverless data querying alternative to BigQuery, not Redshift. When I used Athena for some large scale data querying just a couple years ago it was extremely slow, like two orders of magnitude slower than BigQuery for the same queries. And the UI, documentation, and just general user experience is nowhere near as good as BigQuery's. Nothing from AWS competes with BigQuery, it's genuinely a good product.
- qvrjuec 4y agoThere is a Redshift serverless offering now, not sure how it compares though. I think it's not 100% there when it comes to not having to think about the underlying infra yourself...
- re-thc 4y agoRedshit Serverless still has a minimum cost. Doesn't scale to 0 or even close.
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- shrikant 4y agoAt my previous job, BigQuery was the only Google Cloud service we used -- everything else was AWS.
- adityapatadia 4y agoSeems similar to ours. We only used bigquery and it seems they are not getting those money.
- zdrummond 4y agoNote, compute is going up in price, but storage should be cheaper[1]. So it depends on your workload if and by how much this will impact you [1]https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/introducing-new-bigquery-pricing-editions#:~:text=Lower%20your%20data%20storage%20costs https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/data-analytics/introd...
- kdamica 4y agoDefinitely. But in our case, compute makes up more than 80% of costs, even though we store a large amount of data. I suspect most big customers will come out much worse from this.
- cs702 4y ago> Seems like they are trying to squeeze the users who are most locked in. That's my understanding too. I'm reminded of the classic Eagles song, "Hotel California."
- PedroBatista 4y agoMy immediate answer is: So? It's not like the customers didn't knew this was a REAL possibility. Given the track-record of Google and companies similar to Google, this was a known quantity even at that time. Now pay up.
- f6v 4y ago> Given the track-record of Google and companies similar to Google What does “similar to Google” mean? All for profit companies? My rent doesn’t increase by 100% only because it’s illegal to do so. Otherwise, I don’t see anything immoral about it.
- PedroBatista 4y agoLet me introduce to the World of corporate IT licenses and contracts.. Exhibit number 1: Oracle..
- Mizoguchi 4y agoWhen I called Oracle to inquire about a license and they set up a 1 hour meeting with 5 people in it I knew it would not be cheap. I was right.
- ilikerashers 4y agoI needed an Oracle test database lately to try and get "off" Oracle and they came in and did a licence review. Ended up having to pay £1m due to some legacy non-compliance and couldn't even afford the test DB anymore.
- tanseydavid 4y ago>> What does “similar to Google” mean? All for profit companies? Did you really think the comparison of "similar to Google" would amount to "all for-profit companies?" I think what perhaps was meant by "similar to Google" was: - Mature technology company - Large enough to be at or near the top worldwide in terms of revenue, employees, users, etc. - Involved in many different technologies rather than a single technology
- imwithstoopid 4y agoit was well publicized that Google was turning the screws on its GCP sales staff...maybe this is a put-up-or-shut-up moment for GCP to bring in more money...assuming the sales drives didn't yield
- belval 4y agoBeyond the meme, I don't see how Google could kill GCP without looking like an extremely weak company. They have to make it work to show that they can still deliver results.
- imwithstoopid 4y agoI predict Google will be going through major changes in the next twelve months...they've been caught off-guard by OpenAI/Bing...Google isn't used to playing defense and having to fight for search marketshare by some measures, Google is number 4 in cloud...definitely no better than number 3...you have to wonder if it is worth it for Google to be an also-ran
- re-thc 4y agoNo, it's just how GCP works and has worked. They've been tweaking pricing like this for a long time already.
- justrealist 4y agoGoogle Cloud is their portal into AI/ML workflows as a hosted service. There's no chance they kill it.
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- wodenokoto 4y agoSlot hour? It's been a year or two since I worked with bigquery but I enjoyed that you only paid for data read. It was such a simple way to think about it.
- Nifty3929 4y agoAt small scales, yes. But at more than that it's much cheaper to use dedicated slot reservations.
- kdamica 4y agoThey have on-demand pricing, which is metered by data read, and also reserved slots, which are metered by time. The reserved slots come with a considerable discount to on-demand, so it's worth it when you are consuming compute most of the time.
- garciasn 4y agoThey still have on-demand pricing. It's going from $5/TB to $6.25/TB (a 25% increase).
- boiler_up800 4y agoIt’s not just BigQuery. Pricing for cloud services is increasing across every provider. Azure increased prices in the EU recently https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2023/01/05/consistent-global-pricing-for-the-microsoft-cloud/ https://news.microsoft.com/europe/2023/01/05/consistent-glob... For AWS, one of the people behind https://ec2instances.info https://ec2instances.info showed that the price/performance ratio for newer instances is rising, https://github.com/patmyron/cloud/#compute--memory-unit-prices-by-virtual-machine-type https://github.com/patmyron/cloud/#compute--memory-unit-pric... meaning cloud users are paying more for less.
- crop_rotation 4y agoAWS has never increased prices though, like since they started. Atleast I can't find any references to any price increase. The link showing "price/performance ratio for newer instances is rising" is deceptive. It just shows vcpu/hour, which doesn't really measure real world performance. Like m5.large is a significant performance improvement over m4.large. Newer instances also carry improvements not shown in the link.
- re-thc 4y agoThey haven't and agree at the end of the day over the years performance has increased and price has decreased especially with Graviton.
- cperciva 4y agoS3 prices increased dramatically for some workloads when AWS introduced per-request fees. Admittedly that was a very long time ago, but it has happened.
- Aeolun 4y agoI think the fact that change has already disappeared from our collective memory means people weren’t too bothered. Meanwhile, Google can’t seem to take a step without tripping over a price increase.
- halotrope 4y agoWhat is the best alternative for BigQuery? What is the most economical? Once you are hooked, it is really hard to imagine going to e.g Redshift
- crop_rotation 4y agoSnowflake seems most similar, plus you would get to stay on GCP.
- rekttrader 4y agoExport your data via avro files and try using Athena
- erikcw 4y agoIdeally you’d used Parquet or ORC if querying from Athena/Trino/Presto. Since they are columnar formats you will enjoy considerably faster queues and lower query costs for most query patterns other than “select *…” since the query engine can just retrieve the columns needed for your query instead of the entire row.
- mateo411 4y ago100 percent correct. Ideally you will also partition the data, so your queries can use partitions. Athena charges $5 per terabyte of data scanned, so it's important to get this right.
- jread 4y agoAthena and Redshift Spectrum are the best alternatives on the AWS side.
- veeti 4y agoBuy the biggest server on Hetzner and install ClickHouse (/s?)
- re-thc 4y ago
- bradgessler 4y agoWhen you run out of resources on an elastic cloud: "here's a bill for 2-5x what you thought it would be, good luck paying it!" When you run out of resources on metal: "your application is slowing down, becoming unresponsive, and falling over, good luck getting it back up!"
- organsnyder 4y agoIt's almost like competing for finite resources favors those with more means to pay for them.
- bcrosby95 4y agoOr load shedding.
- Nifty3929 4y agoNot necessarily. Combined with the move to compressed storage, really they're shifting the cost from storage to compute. Storage heavy customers may see their cost go down. Probably this just better aligns the pricing with the cost model. You might also see a bit of savings by using Autoscaling which wasn't available before. Net/Net it depends on the specific usage pattern whether your cost will go up or down. The per-GB price for compressed is higher, but more than offset by the fewer GB being measured, depending on your compression ratio. If the per-GB price doubles and your compression ratio is 8:1, that's a 75% reduction on the storage side.
- ramraj07 4y agoYou started with “not really” but then clarified that it does indeed change the costs to the worse to an unquantified fraction of its customers, so what you should have said is “yes really” both literally and figuratively.
- TylerE 4y agoNo, he started with “not nessesarily”. Words matter.
- foobarbecue 4y agoI guess spelling doesn't, though...
- Retric 4y agoThe article already clarified that not every user will see prices double with the use of “many” rather than “all.” Thus saying “not nessesarily” changes what? It’s like saying you’re wrong and then repeating what someone said.
- linster 4y agoAggressive equivocation.
- Aperocky 4y ago
- VirusNewbie 4y agoBigquery is one of the tools i’ve been most impressed with the last 20 years. It just works so much faster than I assumed it would. Unfortunately for Google I think this will push some folks to self host some of the OSS alternatives, but maybe not. When I think of tools I'd want to pay for outside of barebones VMs in a cloud, the things at the top of my mind are Newrelic and BQ.
- crop_rotation 4y agoSo they have decided that the growth period for GCP is over and now it needs to squeeze all the profits it can. I thought with all that search money pouring down, they would bet a little longer on GCP growth. I remember many large companies that migrated to GCP explicitly cited BigQuery cost effective performance. This should change that calculation significantly. But if GCP loses all cost effectiveness, why would companies chose it, knowing that unlike AWS, GCP products might be priced like a loss leader for some time and can increase any day. Also, if Google becomes content to be just a small cloud provider, do they just bet their entire future on search. What if search gets disrupted (by something like a next gen LLM).
- re-thc 4y agoThis isn't the 1st time GCP has re-evaluated pricing. I wouldn't conclude that it's "over". Seems to just be how they work. E.g. a few months ago pricing of cloud storage was "changed".
- crop_rotation 4y agoYes and before that GKE engine pricing. Once you do it enough times it removes any pretence that these increases were one off and establishes it clearly that products are not sensibly priced and prices would increase when the time to drop the hammer comes.
- brianwawok 4y agoI still am getting a better value than I would at AWS.. and in my view, those are currently the only two games in town.
- techniquetech 4y agoAgree - "only two games in town". Tell us more - what specifically is better value and by how much?
- drewda 4y ago
- opentokix 4y agoSomething has to pay for the AI Race they are losing right now.
- crop_rotation 4y agoThey make enough profits in a quarter to outspend OpenAI for years. They don't need to penny pinch cloud (which was their only promising bet out of ads) to do anything in the AI race. This is just a leadership failure of not knowing what they want to do. Like bet on cloud or bet on AI, bet the company on search for all it's worth, but atleast sit and decide what businesses Google wants to be in.
- KingOfCoders 4y agoIt was rather expensive (but I'd still use it again) last year when we migrated a custom solution to BigQuery. Now it's even more expensive? It was easily 10k/month for a medium startup.
- sfsylvester 4y agoWhat was your solution?
- KingOfCoders 4y agoA custom set up on top of Postgres and Timescaledb. Which worked excellent when being small but would have involved a DBA b/c of company growth.
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- nomilk 4y agoPieter Levels's tweet [1] from earlier about two of google's biggest earners - search and maps - degrading over time had me pondering what google's response would be. I guess ramping up prices across other offerings is one option. [1] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1641759968394113024 https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1641759968394113024
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- dannb 4y agoGoogle also just added new SKUs last year related to multi-region storage buckets, too. I wonder if we'll start to see similar price increases from AWS/Azure. Usually the cost of tech trends down, not up.
- re-thc 4y agoExcept this isn't just tech. It's a managed service. The advancement of technology can no longer cover the increase in electricity and salaries.
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- psanford 4y agoGCP's biggest problem is trust. People (rightfully) don't trust that GCP won't do a rug pull with their production workloads. GCP has done that with both pricing and killing off services. If you are an infrastructure provider, the first thing people are paying you for is to be a stable foundation. If there is no stable foundation there is no trust. Its really hard to imagine GCP fixing this without new leadership. Hire someone from AWS who knows what they are doing. AWS doesn't do this shit. AWS goes so far out of its way to not break customer workloads.
- kccqzy 4y agoSo now you are saying infrastructure providers can't raise prices? Is PG&E not allowed to raise prices on my electricity once I signed up? Is my water company not allowed to raise prices despite the drought where I live? You have way-underestimated the flexibility and resilience of most people. Raising prices isn't the end of the world; for most businesses they just pass it on to their customers.
- psanford 4y agoUh, PG&E can't just raise their rates. They are regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission and have to get approval for rate changes. But thats not really the point. If I am choosing between a service provider that has a history of making large pricing changes to customers and one that has a history of pricing stability, I'm going to take the pricing stability every time. Why is AWS so much better at this than GCP? Is AWS simply better at doing financial modeling and projections? Does no one at GCP think about margins before they launch a product? I think it is more fundamental than that. I think AWS has a respect for its customers that GCP lacks. For GCP, customers are an inconvenient detail that they would prefer to ignore if they could. If there is pain that will either be felt by GCP or by its customers, GCP tends to push it onto its customers. In contrast AWS goes out of its way to not do that to its customers. Old workloads continue to run. Prices are stable. They treat their customers with respect. There's a number of things with Amazon's employee culture that I find distasteful. But when they say "they work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust," that is clearly demonstrated in a way that is simply lacking at GCP.
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- hgsgm 4y agoFlagged editorialized title. Article is PR spam. Actual content is the price sheet: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images/1_packaging_option.max-1400x1400.jpg https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-cloudblog-publish/images...
- _b 4y agoCloud providers raising prices is unsettling. Teams invest many person-years into building software on top of cloud services assuming certain prices. There is a lot of lock in there. Although it is hard to predict to what extent they will pass along future cost savings, or if new cheaper options will come available, it has been safe to assume they won't jack up prices on any given workload. By violating that trust, it will make teams wary of building on top of Google's higher-level services where there is the most lock-in, which unfortunately for Google, is also where the highest margins are.
- muyuu 4y ago> Teams invest many person-years into building software on top of cloud services assuming certain prices & cost structures. part of the implicit risk in using someone else's computers on the bright side, when a large provider changes conditions, similarly run competition will also see their costs rise other competition that took a safer, perhaps more expensive path, will now be more competitive
- paganel 4y ago> part of the implicit risk in using someone else's computers I have not followed this space for almost a decade now but I assume that on-premise costs have also gone up in the last couple of years. They had to do that in order to compensate for the higher energy costs (especially here in Europe) and for the higher employees-related costs (even though those costs might be easing right now). On the other hand I do not know how the higher cloud costs compare to the (presumably) higher on-premise costs in terms of percentages.
- poisonborz 4y agoQuick, grab your Pikachu faces! This never happened before in the tech industry! I'm just sorry for all those people happily waving their certifications on LinkedIn.
- chpatrick 4y ago> it has been safe to assume they won't jack up prices on any given workload. Has it been?
- habibur 4y agoGone are the days when hosting price was dropping every year. Now it's increasing. Blame it on inflation or market downturn or whatever, but a trend that was here since the beginning of the Internet, has now reversed.
- kfk 4y agoThe sensible thing to do at this point is to have a hybrid setup and being able to move load between Cloud providers and from/to on-prem. I understand this is not always practical, but it is going to be a big lever to keep costs down. A Databricks instance running on Cloud can be probably 10x of the cost of running Spark clusters on-prem. Does it make sense? Well, it depends, if you are spending 1m in Databricks charges it does, if you are spending 100k it does not. But I don't see much of these discussions in IT, I think part of the problem is that Cloud charges are hard to monitor and budget.
- jeffbee 4y agoThese threads are part of the canon of "stupid things the hackernewses will say about market economics". It's truly amazing. There is no economic system where a company decides to raise prices based on how much money they need to fund some other thing. That is just beyond stupid. It's a multi-supplier market and prices are set via equilibrium price discovery. Please, HN. Try to be less stupid.
- mh- 4y ago> It's a multi-supplier market and prices are set via equilibrium price discovery. How familiar with BigQuery and its enterprise uses are you? There are alternatives to BQ. There are no alternate suppliers. Migrating would have enormous costs associated for any serious/heavy user (the orgs most affected by this change.)
- lars_francke 4y agoWe are not a direct BigQuery competitor, but we're building an open-source data platform based on Kubernetes over at Stackable: https://www.stackable.tech https://www.stackable.tech | https://github.com/stackabletech/ https://github.com/stackabletech/ It can be interesting for users wishing to avoid vendor lock-in, there are trade offs of course.
- slt2021 4y agoTypical Bait&Switch tactics by cloud providers.
- slotrans 4y agoCurrent employer spends a lot on BigQuery. This change is a ~100% price increase for us. As a direct result, we are drawing up plans to abandon BigQuery, and then GCP entirely. What an own-goal for GCP. Not even Oracle has treated me this badly.