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Tell HN: GCP Offers No Support

11 points by samfisher83 ↗ HN
So I have a personal project which I pay like 10-20 bucks a month for. I am pretty sure I found a bug but apparently there is no way to log a support ticket unless you you sign for the 30 dollar monthly fee. My company also has gcp, azure, and aws. You can guess which service provides the worst support.

If you pay money for something they should have some support. I use GCP because the service I am connecting to is hosted in GCP which will lower my latency, but GCP support is so terrible.

11 comments

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carlhjerpe
You do realize that 30 dollars a month is about a dollar a day right? If you even consider using the support for that price they'll lose money on you.

I'd say that you should get your expectations straight, support isn't cheap.

p0d
The op is not buying pizza. The cloud model is many, many people paying $30 per month. I think it entirely reasonable to expect some type of support. An email/ticket system at least.
carlhjerpe
I mean I don't disagree that they should have something, but sometimes one has to put things into perspective. Also I'd argue it's more many many people paying 100/1000's of dollars, to stay within the 20's tier you're probably using free tier + extras. Being a "big cloud" customer might not be the best choice, the support surface is a lot bigger for GCP than something like DO, Linode or other low-cost providers.

Sounds a bit like gatekeeping maybe, but I understand that support is a separate product.

entropyie
I pay my cable company a comparable amount of money per month, and if it's broken, they will spend an hour on the phone with me fixing it.

I can open a bank account, save €30 per month, and get in person support and advice in branch.

This argument just doesn't hold.

carlhjerpe
The difference would be in how many "fake" support calls one would get. If your internet doesn't work it's probably broken and on the provider, if your cloud is broken you're probably holding it wrong.

The comparison isn't apples to apples, it's 1 service vs 100's (with documentation).

As mentioned, I understand why this is a separate product and I think it's reasonable to pay for support if you need help. There's been some great examples of GCP support bending over backwards to find the most convoluted problems you could imagine. (1)

That'd be worth 30 usd a month to me.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23235995

entropyie
That's fair, and as I posted recently, I am not against charging a one off fee per support call, especially for free tier customers... but as a reference, I have a super cheap cpanel shared hosting plan, less than €15 per month, and I get my support tickets resolved same day from staff based in the EU. If they can do it, so can Google... Paying customers have rights, and I sometimes think that the great "innovation" of saas/cloud is not tech, it's breaking social norms that every other business is following. That is to our detriment.
logicalmonster
In order to properly calibrate ones' expectations, could you please inform the public what threshold of payment properly entitles one to some form of support? Thank you kindly.
carlhjerpe
The threshold would logically be somewhere around the <insert support cost here> mark. This might be 0 or millions of dollars a month. But expecting it to be included and complaining about it when you're purchasing goods for less than a support engineer costs an hour I'd say you should not feel entitled.

Raise the bar of communication a bit please, it's a market with many players, if you don't like the services from Google you take your business elsewhere instead of complaining about unreasonable expectations.

logicalmonster
You're entitled to it, but I think you're trying to justify a really horrendous conclusion that a business shouldn't reasonably be expected to provide some form of human customer service in some fashion or another if it detracts from their profit margin.

And you're looking at this problem in a weird way IMO. You're worried about the costs of support costing Google too much and examining the costs of 1 support engineer against 1 customer, when the real equation is that 1 support engineer should be enough to service the needs of a great deal of customers. It's not 1 support engineer for 1 customer paying $30. The equation is 1 support engineer that can service the needs of a great deal of customers paying $30 each.