GCP Billing FAQ

Questions about Google Cloud Platform Billing?

We've got answers.

Expand All

  • No upfront costs—users are never required to make an upfront investment to use any GCP services.

  • Pay as you go—across compute, storage, and data transfer, Google only charges for resources actually used, allowing users to scale up and down flexibly.

  • No termination fees—users can always scale down or shut off services without incurring any additional cost.

  • Free tier—Google offers a 12-month Free Trial with $300 of credit for all its cloud services. There is also an Always Free Tier which provides the major GCP services for free, with limits on usage. Some of the services included in the free tier and their limits are shown below.

  • Sustained-use discounts—Google offers up to 30% off for workloads that run for most of the billing month on GCP services.

  • Committed-use discounts—users can save up to 57% by committing to use an instance for a certain time period, with no upfront payment and with the flexibility to change instances during the commitment period.

  • Preemptible VMs—similar to the concept of AWS spot instances, Google offers up to 79% off for Virtual Machines that may be shut down at any time and replaced by others.

  • Per-second billing—while other cloud providers charge for services by the hour, Google charges for all services per second, which can add up to major savings when instances are frequently started and stopped.

  • ColdLine storage—Google cloud storage provides NearLine and ColdLine storage tiers for archived data, which are significantly cheaper than ordinary storage and offer fast access.

  • Custom machine types—GCP is the only major cloud provider that lets users assemble their own machine configurations. This can translate into significant savings if you need a machine with stronger capabilities, but the high-end instances offered by other providers are not an exact fit.

The GCP Calculator lets you select any cloud service, specify service parameters such as the number of instances, their specs, how long they are expected to run during the month, storage and data transfer requirements, and get a detailed cost estimate. You can also use the calculator to compare GCP costs to those of other cloud providers.

Tabulate and input the GCP services of your cloud solutions, Use the GCP Calculator and input the necessary details to get an estimated monthly cost for each GCP product.

Feel free to engage our consultant at my-sales@point-star.com.