It’s better than the old enterprise pricing model of “come play golf with us while we figure out how much we can milk you for.”
For example, something like: compute time + availability + hardware + ?
At least with lambdas you can average out time through individual function blocks and scope it to hopefully know what pieces of the users code are the most intensive. Maybe lambda get us closer to this transparency model by showing us down to the functional block what is costing what.
https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/gcp/introducing-cloud...
Re: pricing changes, I presume you're referring to the Distance Matrix API under Maps? That's rather separate from Cloud, but at the end of the day doing a lookup of all routes between M places and N places is going to cost Google M*N more than a single lookup.
Disclaimer: I work at GCP and used to work at Maps (but before the pricing change, which I was not involved in).