I'd like to share some feedback that echoes that of other commentators, from a different perspective.
I run a local cloud developer community with regional pull for attendees, as well as working directly with local early-stage startups looking to become cloud-native.
GCP has always been my go-to for recommendation for our attendees (mix of developers and technical founders, and some enterprise technology folks) given the affordability factor, pathways to additional credits to flesh out ideas, learn new technologies, or stretch the limited runway of their new organization, and ultimately my belief that GCP is one of, if not the best, clouds for developers given the investment in documentation and engagement DevRel channels.
With the rollback of open-enrollment into a smaller plan of Google Cloud for Startups, and price changes like this, I'm fearing I've chosen the wrong hill to die on when talking with these new customers.
I appreciate the inclusion of a free regional cluster per account, which will still afford myself the opportunity to demonstrate k8s at meetups and to end users without taking more of an out-of-pocket hit, and for folks to learn on their own or maintain hobbyist projects on the same budgets they are accustomed to.
My fear with this announcement is that the negative repercussions of this will not be felt on the bottom line or figures that it seems more and more is the priority of the Google Cloud leaders. Rather, it will be felt hardest by the smaller customers; the hobbyist developer or technical co-founder looking to learn new technologies, to scale up their operations, and who at least in my experience, are driving growth in the mindspace around GCP in their communities.
Put another way, moves like this will further tarnish the reputation of Google for those who the sales engineers have for the last two years, promoted heavily no cluster management fees like "the other guys," and in the eyes of many starting out in these areas (of which I recognize most will never become the big customers that satisfy the requirements of executives).
I hope that when the dust settles, this does not lead to a retraction of what makes Google Cloud great in my mind, which is specifically to developer experience and outreach.
With that in said, I would suggest really driving home this change through dismissable in-console communication at the point of cluster creation, on the dashboard, and in email communication to folks who this will impact, with a clear picture of the impact on them. No one wants another large disruption of thousands of small organizations and users, as was the case with the Google Maps pricing change.
Personally, I'd love to see it increased to one free regional or zonal cluster per account for the remainder of 2020, and then making only one zonal free per account effective 2021. Given the uncertainty around engineer capacity and scheduling given the ongoing human malware crisis affecting companies large and small, I think this could be a good middle ground to satisfy most customers affected by these changes, while still achieving the objective of moving this away from being a loss leader of sorts.