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Comment by Jyaif | Hacker News Reader

So that hackers don't waste time looking at Spanner: The price starts at north of 300$ per month (https://cloud.google.com/spanner/pricing)

[edit] I'm apparently wrong.

This is still a masterclass in how not to do a pricing page IMO.

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If I'm reading that page right, the actual minimum cost (in us-west1) is $65.70/month, because a "node" is $657/month, but if you look elsewhere in the documentation, it says a single "instance" can be as small as 1/10 of a node.

I have no idea why they chose to structure the pricing model this way, but it makes the entry-level cost look a lot worse than it really is.

It's a historical artifact of how you used to buy it. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/use-spanner...

It might also be worth pointing out that 'node' does not reference underlying server.

In a PG or similar architecture, node might be used to specify how many "nodes" are in a replicated setup for high availability purposes.

In Spanner, "Node" is a measure of compute capacity (as is the finer-grain processing units) allowing you to scale up/down without impacting an application's workload.

All instances get high availability regardless of number of nodes or processing units, and the specifics of this are handled by the configuration.

That may have been true at one point, but now you can use Spanner closer to $60-70 a month factoring in storage (and even cheaper with committed use discounts) after upgrading from the free trial instance. https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/databases/use-spanner...

How much does Oracle cost for something similar? It seems people are willing to pay money for something as crucial as a database if it works well.

This isn't true at all. Where are you getting your numbers from?

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