Hey everyone, welcome back to My Weird Prompts. I am Corn, and I am sitting here in our living room in Jerusalem with my brother, the man who probably has more browser tabs open than most people have cells in their bodies.
Herman Poppleberry, at your service. And for the record, Corn, those tabs are all essential research. I am currently looking at a white paper on the latency differences between various cloud regions in the Middle East, so do not even start with me about my digital hygiene.
I would never. But speaking of digital hygiene and systems, we have a really interesting one today. Our housemate Daniel sent us a voice note about his business, D S R Holdings. He is a consultant, and he is a big believer in building for scale from day one, even if it is just him right now.
I love that mindset. It is the classic engineer’s dilemma, right? Do you just build what you need for today, or do you build the foundations for a skyscraper even if you are currently only living in a tent? Daniel is definitely a skyscraper guy.
He is. But he is hitting a wall that I think a lot of people hit. He is deep in the Google ecosystem. He uses Google Workspace for everything, you know, Gmail, Calendar, Drive. But he has started dipping his toes into Google Cloud Platform, or G C P, and he is finding that even though they are both Google, they do not always play nice together.
Oh, the Workspace versus G C P divide. It is a classic. It is like they are two different countries that happen to share the same king, but they have different laws, different currencies, and different border agents. It is fascinating because most small business owners never even look at the G C P side of things. They stay in the comfortable, colorful world of Workspace. But Daniel is looking at storage buckets for archiving and using A I tools like Gemini and Vertex A I, and he is realizing the plumbing is a bit more complex than it looks.
Exactly. And that is what we are digging into today. How does a small consultancy or a solo practitioner bridge that gap? How do you use the enterprise-grade power of Google Cloud alongside the daily tools of Workspace without losing your mind or your data?
This is going to be fun. We are going to talk about the architecture of these systems, the specific tools that act as the glue between them, and why Daniel’s idea of using storage buckets for archiving is actually a brilliant move for anyone who hates a cluttered Drive.
So let us start there. Herman, for someone who is used to just dragging a file into a folder in Google Drive, what is a storage bucket? And why would Daniel want to move his old invoices there instead of just leaving them in a folder called Archive twenty twenty-four?
That is a great starting point. Think of Google Drive as your active office. It is where you keep the files you are working on right now. It is indexed, it is searchable, it is designed for collaboration. But Google Drive has a ceiling. Once you get into the terabytes, it starts to get expensive, and more importantly, it gets cluttered. Even with a good folder structure, the sync engine has to keep track of every single file.
Right, and we have all seen that spinning wheel when Drive is trying to sync ten thousand tiny files.
Exactly. Now, enter Google Cloud Storage, or G C S. This is what we mean when we talk about buckets. G C S is what we call object storage. It is not designed for you to open a document and edit it in real time. It is designed for massive, durable storage. The reason it is smart for Daniel is the cost and the classes of storage. In G C P, you have different tiers. You have Standard, which is for data you access often. Then you have Nearline, Coldline, and Archive.
Okay, so if Daniel has invoices from five years ago that he only needs if he gets audited, he probably wants the Archive tier, right?
Precisely. If you put data in the Archive class in a G C P bucket, you are paying around $0.0012 per gigabyte per month. To put that in perspective, storing a terabyte of data on the Archive tier would cost you about $1.23 a month. One dollar twenty-three cents! Compare that to the cost of adding extra storage to a Google Workspace account, which can be ten or twenty dollars a month for a much smaller increment.
That is a massive difference. But there has to be a catch, right?
There is. You have to watch out for retrieval fees and egress costs. Archive storage is like a deep-freeze vault. It is cheap to keep things there, but if you suddenly decide you need to download that entire terabyte tomorrow, Google is going to charge you a retrieval fee, which is currently around zero point zero five dollars per gigabyte. So, it is perfect for things you hope you never have to touch, but it is not for active files.
That is a crucial distinction. But here is the other friction point Daniel mentioned. In Google Drive, I can just search for Client Name and find the invoice. If I move it to a bucket in G C P, does it just disappear from my daily life? How do I actually get to it?
That is the big bridge we need to build. Most people think they have to go into the G C P Console, which looks like the cockpit of a fighter jet, just to find an old file. But the pro move is to use something called Google Apps Script. This is the secret sauce. It is a JavaScript-based platform that runs in the cloud and has built-in connectors for both Workspace and G C P.
I remember we talked about Apps Script in a previous episode. It is basically the glue, isn't it?
It is. A small business owner like Daniel can write a simple script that says: every six months, find all files in this specific Google Drive folder that are older than two years, move them to my G C P Archive bucket, and then leave a small text file or a row in a Google Sheet that acts as an index. That way, he keeps his Drive lean and fast, but he still has a searchable record of what was moved and where it is.
That is interesting. So the Google Sheet becomes his database for the archives. But let us push on the A I side of this. Daniel mentioned Gemini, Vertex A I, and A I Studio. This is where it gets really confusing because Google has about five different names for their A I products right now.
It is a bit of a branding nightmare, honestly. Let us break it down for the D S R Holdings of the world. Gemini is the brand name for the models themselves, but it is also the name of the chatbot you use in your browser. When Daniel is in his email and he clicks that little star to help him write a proposal, he is using Gemini for Workspace.
Right, that is the consumer-facing side. But then he mentioned A I Studio and Vertex A I. What are those doing in a small business context?
Okay, so Vertex A I Studio (formerly AI Studio) is the developer playground. It is actually where I spend most of my time. It is a web-based tool where you can test out the latest Gemini models, like Gemini 2.0, with massive context windows. We are talking about being able to upload millions of tokens—that is thousands of pages of text—and ask questions about it. For a consultant like Daniel, it is perfect for prototyping. If he has a huge project with a client and he wants to summarize ten different reports, he can drop them into Vertex AI Studio and get an answer in seconds.
And Vertex A I? That sounds more enterprise-heavy.
It is. Vertex A I is the full machine learning platform on G C P. Specifically, Daniel should look at the Vertex A I Agent Builder. This is the key to his scaling problem. It allows for something called Grounding. Grounding is when you tell the A I: do not just use your general knowledge, only answer questions based on these specific documents in my G C P bucket.
So if I am Daniel, and I want to use A I to analyze those old files I moved to the G C P bucket, I use Vertex to ground the model in that data?
Exactly. He could build a private A I agent that only he has access to. He could ask it, what was the specific feedback from that client three years ago regarding the marketing strategy? And the A I will search the bucket, find the relevant documents, and give him an answer based on his own historical data. It turns a graveyard of P D Fs into a living knowledge base.
That is a huge level up. But I can hear the listeners thinking, this sounds like a lot of work. Is this really something a small business owner can set up without hiring a developer?
Honestly, in twenty twenty-six, the answer is yes, but you have to be willing to be a bit of a tinkerer. You do not need to be a senior software engineer. If you can follow a tutorial and you are comfortable using an A I to help you write a few lines of code, you can do this. The biggest hurdle is usually the initial setup of G C P, things like Identity and Access Management, or I A M.
Oh man, I A M is the bane of my existence. Every time I try to do something in the cloud, I get a permission denied error.
You and everyone else, Corn! It is the most common frustration. In Google Workspace, permissions are easy. You just click Share. In G C P, you have to deal with Service Accounts. But here is the tip for Daniel: create one Service Account, give it the Storage Object Admin role for your bucket, and use that for your Apps Script. Do not try to manage individual permissions for every single file. Keep it simple while you are in the learning phase.
That makes sense. I want to go back to something Daniel said about wanting to avoid a messy migration later. He is setting this up now so that when D S R Holdings grows, he is not trying to untangle ten years of messy folders.
That is so smart. We see this all the time. Companies hit a certain size and they realize their data is scattered across five different personal Google Drives. By starting with G C P buckets now, Daniel is essentially creating a professional data architecture from the start. If he ever hires an assistant, he does not have to worry about sharing individual folders. He just gives them access to the specific resources in the cloud.
And what about the cost? We talked about the storage being cheap, but does running these A I agents and scripts start to add up?
For a small business, it is usually negligible. Most of these services have a free tier or a pay-as-you-go model. For example, Apps Script is free. G C P buckets are pennies. The A I models in Vertex AI Studio currently have a very generous free tier for a certain number of requests per minute. Even if he moved to the paid tier, he is likely looking at a few dollars a month for the amount of work a solo consultant would be doing. It is much cheaper than paying for a specialized third-party software that tries to do the same thing.
So it is about trading a little bit of technical setup time for a lot of long-term flexibility and cost savings.
Exactly. And it is about ownership. When you use a third-party tool, you are locked into their ecosystem. When you build on top of G C P and Workspace, you own the infrastructure. You can move your data, you can change your scripts, and you can take advantage of new A I models the second Google releases them.
I like that. It feels more robust. Now, let us talk about the day-to-day. If Daniel is using Workspace for his email and calendar, how does he stay productive without getting sucked into the G C P rabbit hole every day?
That is the danger, right? You spend all day building the system and no time doing the work that actually pays the bills. My advice is to use the Workspace side for your interface. Use Google Sheets as your control panel. There is a feature called Connected Sheets that lets you analyze G C P data directly in a spreadsheet. Daniel could have a sheet called Business Dashboard, and in the menu, he could have a button that says Archive Old Files. He never has to leave the familiar world of a spreadsheet, but behind the scenes, that button is triggering a Cloud Function in G C P.
That is brilliant. It is like building your own custom software inside a spreadsheet. I know a lot of people who basically run their entire lives out of Google Sheets, so that would feel very natural to them.
It really is the ultimate low-code platform. And since Daniel is a consultant, he could even build these types of workflows for his clients. Imagine him saying, not only am I going to give you this strategy, but I have also set up a custom A I portal for you to access all our project data. That is a massive value add.
It really is. It moves him from being just a person with some ideas to being a partner who provides a scalable infrastructure. Now, what about the common misconceptions? I think a lot of people assume that if you are a small business, G C P is just not for you.
That is the biggest myth out there. People see the names of the products and they get intimidated. They think BigQuery or Kubernetes sounds like something they do not need. And they are right! They do not need those things. But G C P is modular. Using a storage bucket for archiving is a simple, enterprise-grade solution to a very common small business problem: cluttered storage.
Another thing I hear people worry about is security. Is my data safer in a Google Drive folder or a G C P bucket?
Technically, they are both incredibly secure, but G C P gives you more granular control. In Drive, if you accidentally share a folder with the wrong person, they can see everything. In G C P, you can set up policies that say, for example, this data can only be accessed by this specific Service Account. For a consultant handling sensitive client data, that extra layer of security can be a big selling point.
That is a good point. So, if we were to give Daniel a roadmap for the next few weeks, where should he start?
Step one: Get comfortable with the G C P Console. Just go in, create a project, and create one storage bucket. Do not try to move everything at once. Just pick one old client project and try to move those files into a Nearline or Coldline bucket.
And for the A I side?
Step two: Go to Vertex AI Studio. It is the easiest way to start using Gemini in a professional capacity. Take some of your old project notes, paste them in, and see what the model can do. Once you see the power of that long context window, you will never go back to basic chatbots.
And step three would be the glue, right?
Yes, step three is learning just enough Google Apps Script to connect the two. There are so many templates out there. You can literally ask Gemini, write me a Google Apps Script that moves files from a Drive folder to a G C P bucket. It will give you the code, and you just have to paste it in.
It is amazing how much the barrier to entry has dropped just in the last year or so. I remember when doing something like that would have required a weekend of coding and a lot of coffee.
Now it is a ten-minute conversation with an A I. It is a brave new world, Corn. And for someone like Daniel, who already has that eye on scale, these tools are like giving a carpenter a power saw after they have been using a hand saw for years.
I love that analogy. It is about working smarter, not harder. And it is about building a business that can actually grow without the founder drowning in administrative debt.
Exactly. Administrative debt is what kills small businesses. You spend so much time managing your files and your emails that you do not have time to actually do the work. By automating the archiving and using A I to manage the knowledge base, Daniel is clearing the path for growth.
Well, I think we have given him a lot to chew on. It is fascinating to see how these two worlds, Workspace and G C P, are slowly starting to overlap, even if the bridge between them is still a little bit D I Y.
It will get smoother. I predict that in a few years, Google will make this much more integrated. But for now, the people who are willing to build their own bridges are the ones who are going to have the biggest advantage.
Definitely. Well, Daniel, I hope that helps you and D S R Holdings reach that next level of scale. It is always great to hear from you. And to our listeners, if you are a small business owner or a consultant who has been experimenting with these tools, we would love to hear your stories.
Yes, please reach out. You can find the contact form on our website at myweirdprompts.com. We love hearing about your weird workflows and your system-building adventures.
And if you are enjoying the show, we would really appreciate it if you could leave us a review on Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. It really helps other curious minds find us.
It genuinely makes a difference. We are here every week exploring these rabbit holes, and your support keeps us going.
This has been My Weird Prompts. We will be back next week with another deep dive into whatever is on Daniel’s mind or yours. I am Corn.
And I am Herman Poppleberry. Thanks for listening.
See you next time.
Keep building those skyscrapers, everyone. Even if you are starting in a tent.
Or a very well-organized Google Drive folder.
Especially that.
Alright, let us go see what Daniel is actually doing with those buckets. I bet he is already halfway to an A I-powered archive.
I would not be surprised. He probably has a script running right now that is archiving our conversation as we speak.
Honestly, that would be very on-brand for him.
It really would. Bye everyone!
Bye!
Wait, Corn, did I mention the Archive tier pricing again? It is just so good. One dollar twenty-three cents for a terabyte!
You did, Herman. You definitely did. Let us go.
Just making sure. It is a beautiful thing.
It really is. See ya.
See ya.
