Google announces major price drops for its developer Cloud Platform services

This afternoon at its Cloud Platform event in San Francisco, Google announced that it is cutting the price of almost all of its cloud-computing services. The overall pricing structure has been simplified as well, with many of the charges eliminated and the base prices simplified.

Google’s Computer Engine will see a 32 percent price cut on all sizes, classes, and regions. App Engine prices are also being cut across the board by 30 percent. Could storage pricing is also dropping by 68 percent to just $0.026/month per gigabyte and $0.2/month per gigabyte/DRA.

The original promise of cloud computing was simple: virtualize hardware, pay only for what you use, with no upfront capital expenditures and lower prices than on-premise solutions. But pricing hasn’t followed Moore’s Law: over the past five years, hardware costs improved by 20-30% annually but public cloud prices fell at just 8% per year.

We think cloud pricing should track Moore’s Law, so we’re simplifying and reducing prices for our various on-demand, pay-as-you-go services by 30-85%:

• Compute Engine reduced by 32% across all sizes, regions, and classes.
• App Engine pricing simplified, with significant reductions in database operations and front-end compute instances.
• Cloud Storage is now priced at a consistent 2.6 cents per GB. That’s roughly 68% less for most customers.
• Google BigQuery on-demand prices reduced by 85%.

Google has also announced new sustained dissent pricing. Discounts start when you use a virtual machine for over 25% of the month. When you use one for an entire month, you save an additional 30% over the new prices, this comes out to a 53 percent savings overall.

More information on Google’s price cuts and news on new features from Google’s Cloud Platform event can be found on the official Google Developers Blog.