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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?
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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.
