GCE pricing is great but GCS is not. It is much more expensive than S3 or cloudfront (2.5x - 1.3x) when you consider per request costs. I have brought this up a couple of times on HN to Google cloud employees but nothing has changed.
Other problem areas for GCS compared to S3/Cloudfront
1. SSL support for custom domains in GCS is lacking.
2. Also SSL does not work for domain-named bucket when using <bucket>.storage.googleapis.com/<object> form. You can only use https://storage.googleapis.com/<bucket>/
This makes using SSL for a static site hosted in SSL very difficult because you can't use relative URLs. Cloudfront has solved it by using URLs of the form http(s)://xxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/<object>
That's fair, our native egress pricing is higher. We've chosen to partner with folks like CloudFlare for what we call CDN Interconnect (https://cloud.google.com/interconnect/cdn-interconnect) although this was a somewhat recent announcement.
As far as GCS pricing goes (rather than egress), I think we've been more cautious on the "cost per op" but really led again on cost per byte. This was especially true when we launched Nearline, triggering AWS to launch S3-IA (but with lots of caveats like small files and still a 25% higher base rate).
While not integrated directly into GCS / GCP, does going through CloudFlare alleviate some of your concern?
CDN interconnect is just a bonus :). I prefer GCS having competitive pricing and features since it will be one fewer service to manage.
Also cloudflare is a bit confusing. We only want to serve assets and we serve 3TB per month and I'm not sure if cloudflare is OK with that usage in its free tier option.
I think CloudFlare, Fastly, et al. are all happy to have you serve 3 TiB per month. Their hope is that you grow and upgrade to their paid plans one day.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10442654 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10187600
Other problem areas for GCS compared to S3/Cloudfront
1. SSL support for custom domains in GCS is lacking. 2. Also SSL does not work for domain-named bucket when using <bucket>.storage.googleapis.com/<object> form. You can only use https://storage.googleapis.com/<bucket>/ This makes using SSL for a static site hosted in SSL very difficult because you can't use relative URLs. Cloudfront has solved it by using URLs of the form http(s)://xxxxxxx.cloudfront.net/<object>