How to save users' files in google cloud cheaply

[codya-mubarak]

I am creating a desktop app. The app is free, but the app has a premium feature, which is to backup the users' data to the cloud. The plan was to backup the data to Google Cloud Storage and ask the user to pay a subscription fee. Since most file storage services (Google drive, Dropbox, Onedrive) can store 5 TB for less than $20 / month, I thought I could use the same price for my app. However, when I checked Google Cloud Storage using the pricing calculator, it appears that storing 5 TB of data is much more expensive (see the image below). In other words, if I want to backup the user's files, I need to ask them to pay more than $90 per month! Is there a product in Google cloud that will let me store Terabytes of data for a much cheaper price, or is using my own servers the only solution?

[FrancoGP]

Hi @codya-mubarak ,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

There are some things that we may consider here to make it more feasible for you to provide the service that you want.

• At least from my perspective GCS would be the best solution for you in this case
• The numbers that you see on the GC calculator are estimates without taking in consideration other factors like networking, but as well thinking that you'll use the full range of 5TB per user (maybe this is the case, but doesn't seem like it)
  • Princing in GCS is dynamic, so you have to in reality know how much your users will use and how often they'll use their data, ingress to GCS is free of charge but egress is a complete different story
  • You could implement a pretty aggressive life cycle policy and change the tiers on the non-used files in a matter of days. This would decrease the cost of your storage CONSIDERABLY real quick, unless there are a lot of retrievals for those files. So tinker quite a bit on how to deal with the policy.
  • Here is a good example of GCS calculations without any tweaks, so you could get the idea behind it

[codya-mubarak]

Thanks for the info! I did not consider using a colder class. I just checked the pricing calculator but using Archive Storage instead, and true, the cost was greatly reduced. I think I will use Archive Storage but enforce a limit on the amount of files downloaded per month. Do you think this is a valid strategy?

[FrancoGP · Accepted solution]

Yes! That sounds like a good strategy, there is just one thing to consider. Archive storage has a minimum of 1 year "life billing". That doesn't mean you can't delete the file before, but you'll be charged as if the object was present for the full minimum lifecycle.

If you bill your users for a yearly subscription, go for it! But if your users will leave after the first month or two you'll be "stuck" with the cost of those files or their early deletion, but that depends on your knowledge of your user base. Maybe you can assign archive directly to yearly based users and a more relaxed rule for other users like coldline to archive after 2 months or directly use coldline for this users and know you only have a 90 days "mandatory" life

But overall yes, I think this is the way to go, as this will be just mere backups your strategy it's good for this use case.