Your Cloud Storage Bucket Has 2TB of Data Nobody Touched in 6 Months (You're Paying 16x Too Much) 💾

Standard storage costs $0.020/GB/month. Archive storage costs $0.0012/GB/month. That's a 94% difference. If you have 2TB of data sitting untouched for 6 months in a Standard bucket, you're paying $40/month for something that should cost $2.40. Lifecycle policies fix this automatically, and Terraform deploys them in 5 minutes. Here's the dirty secret of Cloud Storage: every object starts in Standard class and stays there forever unless you do something about it. GCP won't move your data to a cheaper tier for you. That 18-month-old log archive? Still in Standard. Those backup snapshots from last year? Standard. That ML training dataset you ran once? Standard. Lifecycle policies automatically transition objects to cheaper storage classes as they age. No manual work, no scripts, no cron jobs. Just Terraform rules that save money while you sleep. 📊 The Storage Class Cheat Sheet Class Cost/GB/month Min Duration Best For Retrieval Fee Standard $0.020 None Hot data, frequent access Free Nearli