Ask HN: Why is Google Cloud Storage 56.5% more expensive than AWS S3?

5 points by dcgoss 10y ago ↗ HN

We use Google Cloud Platform, and their Compute Engine pricing is phenomenal compared to AWS. Google seems to be aiming for competitive pricing in their cloud offerings.

However, it seems to me that their Cloud Storage offering is substantially more expensive compared to AWS's S3 offering. Why is this? Why is GCP not pricing this service competitively?

Here are the monthly price calculators that show S3 is cheaper than GCS - hopefully I didn't type anything in wrong. I used 1 TB of storage, 10 million get operations and 10 million post operations, and 200 GB egress.

S3 monthly: $102.63

GCS monthly: $160.62 (about 56.5% more expensive)

GCS: https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=cddb4e9a-f2e0-4b9e-8644-8e512bf77ca5

S3: https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html#r=IAD&s=S3&key=calc-684497CE-C3B9-47C3-85DF-247D9149FABA

1 comment

[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 12.6 ms ] thread

terrances 10y ago ↗

* note I am a Googler.

Simply put it appears operations are more expensive on Google than Amazon.

I'll break out the numbers below.

Storage

Google 1000gb x $0.026 = $26 Amazon 1000gb x $0.030 = $30

Egress: Google 200gb x $0.12 = $24 Amazon 199gb x $0.90 = $17.91

Get Operations: Google 10m / 10k × $0.010 = $10 Amazon 10m / 10k × $0.004 = $4

Put Operations: Google 10m / 10k x $0.100 = $100 Amazon 10m / 1k x $0.005 = $50

After breaking down the numbers you see that operations are more expensive. Google is a bit less expensive for data at rest and Amazon is a bit less expensive on egress. I'll chat with some people at Google to see if there is anything we can do.