"great pricing" it is not. None of the major cloud providers have great pricing with the exception of some niche cases.
Look at Hetzner. Look at the cheap VPS options. Google/AWS don't come even close.
Look at Hetzner. Look at the cheap VPS options. Google/AWS don't come even close.
Where I do agree is networking egress. The big three providers all have metered bandwidth rates that are way above the "all inclusive" fee you pay to Hetzner, OVH, DO, and others. The cheapest way to host an ftp server that serves 20 TB per month is certainly on one of these (today). None of these providers will let you serve 1 PB / month this way, but if you're in their sweet spot and they can make it work out on average, it's a good fit.
But if you're looking to just have a simple "VPS" in the cloud, our f1-micro is just over $4/month (the AWS t2 series is also super cheap). Again, you're right if you're talking about networking egress, but not everybody needs to serve multiple TB per month.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud, so I'm trying to take your money in exchange for services.
To the extent that a developer uses GCE for only part of a month? Or to the extent that a developer uses GCE for 100% of a month? I would think that GCE is not extremely competitive (relative to dedicated offerings) if used on a 24/7 basis.
Google / AWS cloud is more for running applications at scale and dynamically creating VMs and load balancing across servers with storage, logging, snapshots etc as a service.