To be clear, looks like GCP is disincentivizing:

- Using multi-regional storage (used to be a 30% premium, now much more)

- Making lots of object writes (Class A) vs lots of reads (Class B)

So, if you can:

- Move to regional or dual-region (NAM4) storage

- Snowball your writes into bigger overall objects, <3 immutability

- Keep your data in the same region as access

Then you can reduce the impact here.

They are also closing the Coldline/Nearline loophole, where you could use a bucket lifecycle policy to keep your objects in Standard (cheap access) for a few weeks/months, and then move them to a cheap long term storage tier (Nearline/Coldline), because that move is another Class operation, that just got a lot more expensive. This is inline with two years ago when they quietly moved lifecycle operation pricing from the origin service tier (e.g. cheap Standard storage) to the destination tier (e.g. much more expensive Coldline), cutting down on the savings of tier jockeying.