Think about any medium sized dev agency managing 3x environments for 20x customers. That's 50k/year out of the blue.

My problem is that this fee doesn't look very "cloud" friendly. Sure the folks with big clusters won't even notice it, but others will sweat it.

The appeal of cloud is that costs increase as you go, and flat rates are typically there to add predictability (see BigQuery flat rate). This fee does the opposite.

It's charged per-cluster. GKE encouraged (and was great for) running multiple clusters for all kinds of isolation and security reasons.

This cost increases rapidly for those scenarios.

$3600/year is significant for a startup on a shoestring budget.

Then manage k8s yourself.

Or, better yet, don't use k8s. You don't need it, especially as a startup on a shoestring budget. You can migrate later if you decide you really need to, but just a plain LAMP gets you 99% of the way.

But then you can’t put k8s on you resume for when said startup implodes.

If there were a lower complexity way to deploy containerized apps supported widely I think tons of people would go for it. Currently there's not really much of a middle ground between Cloud Run and K8s offered. It's kind of absurd, honestly.

Google App Engine has been exactly this since 2008.

My impression of app engine is that you have to use all the cloud* services like SQL, cache, etc, which will make it significantly more expensive, even if it does that app layer fine. Is that wrong?

It's wrong today. It was true in 2008, when GAE was Google's entire cloud offering (and there was no Docker or K8s).

Around the time "Google Cloud Platform" became a thing, Google changed GAE from an encapsulated bubble into a basic frontend management system that interacts with normal services through public APIs (either inside or outside GCP). It's more expensive than GCE, but it's fully managed and lets you skip the devops team.

So ask for Google cloud for startups? One free cluster is enough to get started.

> Google Cloud for Startups is designed to help companies that are backed by VCs, incubators, or accelerators, so it's less applicable for small businesses, services, consultancies, and dev shops.[1]

This makes it seem like Google Cloud for Startups is aimed at startups that aren't really on a shoestring budget.

[1]: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

Like every "special offer for startups", it's a vulture waiting for funding round to close.

My boss viewed it as the main way to deploy containerized systems offered by cloud providers and figured we could run most of our internal only things in it for a couple hundred a month - we don't really need the guarantees and scale, and he saw it as a way to avoid creating excess numbers of dedicated VMs, as cloud run isn't sufficient for our non-static stuff. This view up until now has actually been quite accurate because of the dedicated usage discounts.

So I guess the big question in my mind is how do you run containerized apps in the major clouds besides K8s if it's a bulldozer and you just need a cargo bike? Is there something simpler?

E.g. https://aws.amazon.com/ecs/ - that was quite nice https://aws.amazon.com/fargate/ - haven't tried

You could consider the flexible app engine

How is it not a rounding error for Google?

I think you mean opex and not capex here.