Audio streaming from Google Cloud Storage and CDNs - costs

Question

So I'm making an app that involves streaming audio(radio-like) from the Google Cloud Storage and was looking into the costs. It seems it would be much too expensive as is.

e.g. Lets say I have 10MB audio files, a user listens to 20 files a day and I have 2000 active users. That's 400GBs or $48/day. i.e. ~$1440/month just for that.

I then looked into putting a CDN in front of it, to minimize direct reads from the Storage. Now initially that made sense to me. The CDN would cache the audio files and the clients would be getting the files from the cache most of the time. However, as I was looking at Fastly's pricing (Fastly is a Google partner and seems like a good fit) I noticed that they seem to be pricing bandwidth usage to their cache at the exact same rate as Google cloud does ($0.12/GB). So unless I'm reading this wrong, putting up the CDN would not save me ANY money. Now I get that there are other reasons why putting a CDN in front of it could be a good idea, but am I really reading this right?

Also, if you have any other tips on how I should set this up, I'm all ears.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65918111/audio-streaming-from-google-cloud-storage-and-cdns-costs

Answer 1

Estimating the invoice of such a service is a complex matter. To get an informed answer and tips regarding possible implementation paths I would suggest reaching out to a GCP Sales representative. Similarly you should contact the Fastly team to get a precise picture of their pricing model.

Moreover, any estimate we could make here would be outdated as soon as any of the respective pricing model changes, which would invalidate the answer and probably drive future readers to wrong conclusions.