We know you have a choice of public cloud providers – and choosing the best fit for your application or workload can be a daunting task. Customers like Avaya, Snapchat, Ocado and Wix have selected Google Cloud Platform because of our innovation and proven performance, combined with flexible pricing models. We’ve recently made headlines for our latest product introductions like Google Cloud Storage Nearline and Google Cloud Bigtable, and today, we’re also raising the bar with our pricing options.

Compared to other public cloud providers, Google Cloud Platform is now 40% less expensive for many workloads. Starting today, we are reducing prices of all Google Compute Engine Instance types as well as introducing a new class of preemptible virtual machines that delivers short-term capacity for a very low, fixed cost. When combined with our automatic discounts, per-minute billing, no penalties for changing machine types, and no need to enter into long-term fixed-price commitments, it’s easy to see why we’re leading the industry in price/performance.

Price Reductions

Last year, we committed that Google Cloud Platform prices will follow Moore’s Law, and effective today we’re reducing prices of virtual machines by up to 30%.

Configuration
US Price Reduction
Standard
High Memory
High CPU
Small
Micro
20%
15%
5%
15%
30%

The price reductions in Europe and Asia are similar. Complete details on our compute pricing is available at our Compute Engine pricing page.
We have continued to lower our pricing since Google Compute Engine was launched in November of 2013; together, these price cuts have reduced VM prices by more than half.

Introducing Google Compute Engine Preemptible VMs

For some applications we can do even better: if your workload is flexible, our new Preemptible VMs will run your short-duration batch jobs 70% cheaper than regular VMs. Preemptible VMs are identical to regular VMs, except availability is subject to system supply and demand. Since we run Preemptible VMs on resources that would otherwise be idle, we can offer them at substantially reduced costs. Customers such as Descartes Labs have already found them to be a great option for workloads like Hadoop MapReduce, visual effects rendering, financial analytics, and other computationally expensive workloads.

Importantly, unlike other clouds’ Spot Instances, the price of Preemptible VMs is fixed – making their costs predictable.

Regular n1-standard-1
Preemptible n1-standard-1
Savings
$0.050 /hour
$0.015 /hour
70%

For further information about Preemptible VM pricing, please visit our website.

Google Cloud Platform costs 40% less for many workloads vs. other public cloud providers

Our continued price/performance leadership goes well beyond list prices. Our combination of sustained use discounting, no prepaid lock-in and per-minute billing offers users a structural price advantage which becomes apparent when we consider real-world applications. Consider a typical web application or mobile backend. Its development environment supports software builds and tests, presenting a bursty, daytime load on cloud computing resources. The production environment handles actual user traffic, with a diurnal cycle of demand, aggregate growth over time, and a larger overall footprint than the development environment. The developer environment would benefit from per-minute billing because it can be turned on and off more quickly and you only pay for what you use. The production environment would benefit from sustained use discounting, up to 30% additional discount with no upfront fee or commitment, because it always needs to be on.

Our customer-friendly billing, discounting, and lack of prepaid lock-in, combined with lower list prices, leads to a 40% lower price on Google Cloud Platform for many real-world workloads. Our TCO Tool lets you explore how different combinations of development and production instances, as well as environmental assumptions, change the total cost of a real-world application hosted in the cloud.

Many factors influence the total cost of a real-world application, including the likelihood of design changes, the rate of decrease of compute prices, and whether you’ve been locked into price contracts which are now above market rates, or on instances that don’t fit your current needs anymore. With Google Cloud Platform’s customer-friendly pricing model, you're not required to make a long-term commitment to a price, machine class, or region ahead of time.

This graphic illustrates how our lower list prices and customer-friendly pricing practices can combine to produce a 40% total savings.
Your exact savings depend on your specific application, and may be even greater than what is shown here. To see the impact of our customer-friendly pricing on your specific workload, explore our TCO Tool.

If you have specific pricing questions, please visit the updated pricing page on our website. To get started with testing your own workload, we’ve made it easy with our free trial program.

- Posted by Urs Hölzle, Senior Vice President, Technical Infrastructure