Google sells 'predictable' storage costs: $120k for a year before you get a foot in the door, though

Get the forecast right and you'll get a, er, discount

Google has squeezed out a plan for what it calls "predictable" cloud storage pricing, locking customers into a year-long payment commitment.

The barrier to entry for the Cloud Storage Growth Plan is at least $10k a month for a year – so $120,000 – at a fixed rate, based on GCP storage needs the customer has forecast for high frequency access, nearline and coldline data.

After 12 months, Google tallies up the "actual" storage costs. It must be betting you'll use more than you think, because it said if a customer committed to another year at their past year's peak per-month usage and it was within 30 per cent of the forecast, the prior 12 month's overage would be free.

Alternatively, if the actual cost was more than 30 per cent away from what the customer forecast, it would have to fork out that overage across the next 12 months along with the fresh yearly commitment – or cough it up all at once to leave the plan.

AWS has no equivalent and has always eschewed long-term contracts for its storage. However it does have reserved instances where an organisation pays upfront and saves "up to 75 per cent" over the same capacity if it were paid for on-demand.

Microsoft's Azure's pricing structure is similar to that of Amazon's cloud, even to the extent of having pricing reservations for one-year or three-year bulk storage commitments at an "up to 72 per cent" discount.

Google said it had also added geo-redundancy to its Coldline storage and dropped the price, which now starts at $0.004/GB – price-matching Amazon's S3 Glacier.

Google has also made object lifecycle management available. This moves data between GCP storage classes according to user-set policies, with the redundancy level maintained. ®