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Ask HN: Storage pricing: GB or GiB

by esher on 3/14/24, 7:58 AM with 11 comments

I am designing a pricing page for our cloud hosting thing. DevOps suggested to use Gibibyte (GiB) instead of Gigabyte (GB) annotation. Binary calculation (GiB) is used under the hood (I believe). I think the actual difference is marginal.

But I wonder if we are doing anyone a favor by presenting it as GiB. Most hosting vendors use the classical metric annotation today:

- DigitalOcean: GiB - Google Cloud: GB - Vultr: GB - Hetzner: GB - AWS: GB - macOS: GB

I see this has been asked before in 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13658889

  • by Spooky23 on 3/15/24, 6:25 PM

    If you’re metering it, be consistent with your competition or places in adjacent markets.

    The risk is you can look expensive to a casual observer if they don’t pay attention.

  • by gus_massa on 3/14/24, 6:53 PM

    piocodollars per byte https://www.tarsnap.com/picoUSD-why.html if you want to scare all your non technical users.

  • by stop50 on 3/14/24, 8:11 AM

    With Gigabyte the difference is not so marginal anymore(7.4%). With Terabyte its already 10%

  • by stephenr on 3/15/24, 6:21 AM

    Whatever you use, make sure it's clear what you mean: i.e. the `1GB = 1 billion bytes and 1TB = 1 trillion bytes` type footnote used on sales pages for products with a storage component.

    Consider who the target audience is. Technical users will know (or should at least understand if you provide more details) GiB, but non technical users are much more likely to understand GB.

  • by mcsniff on 3/14/24, 6:35 PM

    Pick your unit of measurement and use it everywhere.

    GB is standard enough and specific enough at that large of a size and most people don't know what the hell a "gibibyte" is anyway.

  • by lulznews on 3/15/24, 10:06 PM

    I do a lot of work in this space and imo it’s better to use GiB notation since it’s a clear way to avoid any confusion.

  • by codingdave on 3/14/24, 11:24 AM

    You should be accurate - charging by one, but communicating pricing by the other is just a road towards conflict with your customer.