Google LLC today detailed a series of pricing updates that will roll out in the coming months to its public cloud platform and the Google Workspace productivity suite.

In conjunction, the company will upgrade BigQuery with an enhanced auto-scaling feature. BigQuery is Google’s cloud-based data warehouse. According to the company, both the BigQuery enhancement and the pricing updates are designed to help companies optimize their Google Cloud spending. 

Google Cloud’s enterprise customers can receive discounts and other benefits if they commit to spending a certain sum on the platform for several years. As part of today’s update, the search giant debuted a new procurement option for enterprises called Flex Agreements. Such agreements also offer access to discounts and related benefits, but remove the need to make the upfront spending commitment that was necessary until now.

“These commitments can be challenging for those who don’t have clear visibility into their future cloud consumption needs,” Google Cloud executives Kelly Ducourty and Joe Matz explained in a blog post. “That’s why today we’re launching Flex Agreements, which enable customers to migrate their workloads to the cloud with no up-front commitments.”

Google is also making other pricing changes. The search giant disclosed today that it plans to make a subset of its public cloud offerings available in three new editions: Standard, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Each edition will be accessible at a different price point.

The most expensive pricing tier, Enterprise Plus, includes features designed to help companies more easily manage regulatory compliance. Customers will also receive disaster recovery and “advanced security” tools, as well as other capabilities. Google said Enterprise Plus versions of its products are designed to host mission-critical workloads, particularly for companies in regulated industries such as banking and the public sector.

The midrange Enterprise product edition will “include a broad range of features designed for customers with workloads that demand a high level of scalability, flexibility and reliability,” Ducourty and Matz detailed. The entry-level Standard product tier is set to offer a more basic set of features. That basic feature set includes, among other things, autoscaling capabilities. 

Many Google Cloud products already feature autoscaling mechanisms. One of the products on that list is the company’s BigQuery data warehouse, which can automatically provision new infrastructure when user demand increases. BigQuery also removes the extra infrastructure when it’s no longer needed, which helps companies avoid cost overruns.

Google plans to enhance BigQuery’s auto-scaling capability as part of the updates announced today. The service will gain the ability to add and remove infrastructure in a more granular manner, according to the company. “This allows you to provision additional capacity in smaller increments, so you never overprovision and overpay for underutilized capacity,” Ducourty and Matz wrote. 

The second set of pricing-related updates will roll out for its Google Workspace productivity suite. The company is increasing the price of the productivity suite’s basic Flexible Plan as well the Enterprise Standard plan, which targets large organizations. Google is launching a new annual subscription in conjunction that is designed to help companies reduce software expenses.

Following the price increase, the Business Starter, Business Standard and Business Plus versions of Google Workplace will cost $7.20, $14.40 and $21.60 per user per month, respectively, with a Flexible Plan. The newly announced annual plan will provide lower prices. It makes Business Starter, Business Standard and Business Plus accounts available for $6, $12 and $18 per month, respectively.

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