Google Cloud Storage
Ranked 7 of 10 object storage by recommenders
Recommended as a solid, S3-comparable object store that is protocol compatible. Critics say pricing, egress and bandwidth charges are high and hard to predict.
Recommended as a solid, S3-comparable object store that is protocol compatible. Critics say pricing, egress and bandwidth charges are high and hard to predict.
25 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 9
- criticize it
- 16
- approval share
- 36%
Recommended in 5 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 9 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 5 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Good product, comparable to S3
“Google Cloud Storage is arguably as good as S3, and is protocol compatible”
Comment from 24 Aug 2026 in “Show HN: PicoMQ – Durable Streams over HTTP, on object storage” “Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.”
Comment from 29 Oct 2026 in “Gemini 4 Carbon”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Pricing high and hard to predict
“Google Drive offers substantially better per-terabyte pricing for storage than Google Cloud Storage”
Comment from 19 Mar 2026 in “Anthropic takes legal action against OpenCode” “Google also makes monthly cloud storage fees for anyone who has large files or photos.”
Comment from 12 May 2026 in “Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message” “it is unreasonable how much they charge for both storage and inter-az bandwidth”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left” - Comment from 16 Sep 2026 in “AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran”
- Comment from 19 Nov 2025 in “Building more with GPT-5.1-Codex-Max”
Confusing UI and billing
“Who designed that modal? It takes me a solid minute to figure out if I'm publishing private data or not.”
Comment from 25 Mar 2026 in “Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy” “The biggest problem is user interface with s3 like storage and predictable pricing”
Comment from 7 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Stop paying for Dropbox/Google Drive, use your own S3 bucket instead” Expensive egress and bandwidth charges
“GCS and ABS are slightly cheaper for storage but more for egress.”
Comment from 1 Oct 2026 in “Cloudflare K2: serverless event streams” “it is unreasonable how much they charge for both storage and inter-az bandwidth”
Comment from 11 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left”
Other object storage people recommend
The four most recommended other object storage, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | 170 | 84 | 67% | 12 | 14 yrs3 owners | Approved |
| Cloudflare R2 | 85 | 14 | 86% | 12 | — | Approved |
| Backblaze B2 | 50 | 14 | 78% | 12 | — | Approved |
| AWS S3 | 17 | 7 | 71% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Google Cloud StorageThis page | 9 | 16 | 36% | 5 | — | — |
What people said
23 of the 25 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.”
“VPC, cloud sql, filestore, gcs, everything worth a damn is dead”
“GCS and ABS are slightly cheaper for storage but more for egress.”
“it's a 20% discount on a 10x inflated price, so it's an 8x inflated price”
“Google Cloud storage has raised prices a few times, and added various quotas and limits”
“Google Cloud Storage is arguably as good as S3, and is protocol compatible”
“GCP, where the SLA seems mostly useful so the enterprise acquisition team can say "they have SLA, I can't get fired for choosing them"”
“Google also makes monthly cloud storage fees for anyone who has large files or photos.”
“it is unreasonable how much they charge for both storage and inter-az bandwidth”
“GCS adds two orders of magnitude for the same offense”
“real backups belong in an independent store (S3/GCS) in a different region with object lock enabled”
“reading a few cases like this motivated me to cancel my GCS account”
“Google drive pricing is cheaper than S3/Google cloud storage for storage.”
“The biggest problem is user interface with s3 like storage and predictable pricing”
“Who designed that modal? It takes me a solid minute to figure out if I'm publishing private data or not.”
“Google Drive offers substantially better per-terabyte pricing for storage than Google Cloud Storage”
“if you use storage.googleapis.com privacy is zero”
“It has some limitations but I believe it wouldn't bother to a typical user.”
“They lack "infinite" bandwidth unlike S3 and GCS.”
“Often both (looking at you, aws, gcs, azure).”
“GCS billing is complicated to figure out vs OpenAI billing or anthropic.”
“Wait till you encounter the combo of gcloud parallel composite uploads + versioning + soft-delete + multi-region bucket”
“Google Cloud Storage significantly more so than AWS”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.