what is the GKE price increase?

Ah, that price change, sorry, I saw that one and thought this was something else!

Right, that was one of the big draws of GKE. Now EKS dropped to $.10 and AKS is still free for managed control planes. It seems very shortsighted and will probably scare off a lot of customers.

Yup, was the main reason every single person I know who chose to use GKE. As they are the under dog, it was a compelling reason to choose them. Now, there's very little reason to choose them over competitors. Not sure who made this choice, seems brain dead.

I guess I don’t get the issue

Its not much of a cost for most orgs using Kubernetes, but it speaks to Google's willingness to make unilateral changes to existing deal structures. AWS pretty much only reduces prices and create new products. For a good case study you can look at how they handled high usage of SSM Parameter store by making a paid option for high use clients instead of charging existing users more. Google itself has a reputation for canceling products, and I think this stokes fears that more will come in the future. Personally I felt that since Google isn't the incumbent in public cloud that they would work harder and charge less to buy share and establish trust. That was true for some time, but this and the rollout of Anthos (call for pricing) enterprise features speaks to a culture that doesn't sit well with those who value continuity.

Well its a huge deal for bootstrapping. Prior to this change, bootstrapping a product on GCP would only cost you the basic cost of the VM instances. You could get away with 100% pre-emtptible in dev/stage environments for less than $100 dollars. But now, if you need 3 environments dev/stage/prod, your going to pay at least 146 base cost plus your normal cost. So essentially your paying 176 for clusters that really don't do anything (dev/stage).

Interesting to see GKE go that way, they did charge originally and when AKS came on the scene and didn't charge they dropped their charge too. Having said that I can see this being neccesary in order to provide an SLA, free is great but some do want support. I would prefer a different model to provide an SLA though maybe a support charge instead?

Let's be honest, no one cares about an SLA. If my service is down, and I lose 10 customers that ended up costing me thousands of dollars of revenue, I could really give two craps about being refunded a very small amount of money due to the SLA agreement. They are pretty worthless.