The ability to pay as you go is one of the big selling points for cloud services, doing away with overpaying for servers or enterprise software licenses that may end up underused. But the flipside is that cloud services costs such as data storage can be unpredictable budget-busters.

Google LLC today introduced a new pricing plan for its Cloud Storage service that aims to address that issue. Its new Storage Growth Plan for Cloud Storage offers a way to avoid the swings in cost, usually upward, when a company suddenly needs to store or access an unexpected amount of data.

It works like this: An organization commits to spend at least $10,000 a month on Cloud Storage every month for a year and the monthly amount will remain steady for the year. Even if the customer adds more data than the spending commitment covers, it won’t be charged extra for that year.

But at the end of the 12 months, it’s time to pay the piper. Here’s where there are two choices.

For one, the customer can commit to another 12 months at the peak usage amount, in which case if that peak usage is within 30 percent of the original commitment, the previous year’s overage is free. If it’s more than 30 percent, the customer must repay the remainder over the next year.

The other choice is to exit that plan and pay for the overage. Clearly Google’s hoping that choice won’t be as attractive. Indeed, Christopher Talbott, head of Cloud Storage product marketing, said in an interview that Google expects most customers will be within that 30 percent.

Talbott said customers have been asking for ways to have a better sense of month-to-month costs and, just as important, a way to keep costs steady because both large enterprises and startups need to avoid huge, unexpected spikes in costs that can bust budgets.

“This is all about giving customers cost visibility,” he said. “They need better cost predictability, but still need the ability to burst over” the limit as needed. He said Google’s sales force can work with customers to determine the optimum level and type of storage to pay for.

The need for predictability and cost control in cloud services suggests there’s a looming pivot back in some cases to traditional software license arrangements, with a fixed price, he added.

Talbott claimed the offering is unique among competitors for now, at least. He said Google’s storage is dollar-based, so it applies to all the classes of storage, from “hot” storage for currently used data to “cold” storage for data used less often.

Google reckons the new plan is appropriate for organization creating a lot of images, for example, that might see spikes as millions of new images are added. The company trotted out one customer in that realm, Recursion Pharmaceuticals Inc., which has what is said to be the world’s largest biological image dataset, adds more than 2 million new images a week.

Google also announced a 42 percent price drop for its Coldline, the lowest-access tier of Cloud Storage, in a single regional location.

Image: Google