Storage
Mobility
Protection
Analysis and control
TOPICShare
How Is Google Cloud Priced?
Google Cloud Platform is a set of public cloud computing services provided by Google. The platform features a variety of hosted services, including infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), for application development, storage, and compute, which run on Google data centers’ hardware.
Google Cloud offers several pricing models, including pay-as-you-go, long-term reservations, and a free tier option. Your organization will need to decide which model is the most suitable, according to your budget and computing needs.
Google Cloud costs are affected by additional components, including compute, storage, network, SQL, and serverless pricing. These factors should be explored when selecting a pricing structure for your organization.
This is part of an extensive series of guides about FinOps.
In this article:
- Google Cloud Pricing Models
- Google Cloud Compute Pricing
- Google Cloud Storage Pricing
- Google Cloud Networking Pricing
- Google Cloud SQL Pricing
- Google Cloud Serverless Pricing
- Google Cloud Cost Optimization with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Google Cloud Pricing Models
Google Cloud Platform provides the pricing models seen here:
Pay-as-you-go pricing model
Google Cloud provides a pay-as-you-go on-demand pricing model. This is most suited to individuals who expect to use the cloud intermittently, as it gives you the flexibility to remove or add services as you wish. However, this degree of flexibility incurs a cost, meaning that the pay-as-you-go model is the most expensive option per hour.
Long-term plan
If you are planning to use the cloud for a long period, and are willing to make an extended-period upfront commitment to your cloud deployment, you can achieve greater savings than you would with the pay-as-you-go model. Google provides long-term pricing terms with upfront obligations of one year or three years. This plan is called Committed Use, and it provides significant savings when compared to an on-demand pricing model—as much as 70% on Compute Engine.
Free tier option
If you are not at a stage where you are ready to move to a cloud service, Google Cloud provides the free tier option over a wide variety of products. This gives you a predefined resource amount over a specific period, suitable for those looking to try out a service.
Google also provides some “always free” cloud services, which are suitable for organizations that have very low usage requirements and are not fussed if operations are interrupted.
If you choose the GCP Free Tier, you will receive 24 cloud services and products within monthly usage limits.
New Google Cloud customers receive $300 of credit for free, which they can spend on any Google Cloud services or products.
You can use various free products across AI, IoT, database, compute, and storage, and these largely cover the cloud services that are most widely used.
Related content: Read our guide to managing and optimizing Google Cloud costs
Google Cloud Compute Pricing
Compute Engine is a modifiable compute service that lets you develop and run virtual machines (VMs) on Google’s infrastructure. In Compute Engine, machine types are curated and grouped according to types of workloads. The main types are accelerator-optimized, general-purpose, compute-optimized, and memory-optimized.
Google charges per actual usage, with the option of sustained use discounts. If you run a VM for more than 25% of a month, you are eligible for discounts between 20-30%.
You can also use short-lived preemptive instances to reduce costs by up to 80%. Such instances are suitable for fault-tolerant workloads and batch jobs.
Google Cloud Storage Pricing
Google Cloud Storage is known as an enterprise public storage platform, which can retain large unstructured data sets. Organizations can buy the storage for infrequent or primary accessed data.
Cloud Storage pricing is calculated according to the following elements:
- Data storage—the volume of data retained in your buckets. Storage rates differ according to the storage class of your data and the place of your buckets.
- Network usage—the volume of data read from or moved from one bucket to another.
- Operation usage—the activities you undertake in Cloud Storage, including listing the objects in the buckets.
- Retrieval and early deletion fees—relate to data retained in the Coldline, Archive, and Nearline storage classes.
- Inter-region replication—applies to data replicated over locations.
As a component of the Google Cloud Free Tier, Cloud Storage offers resources at no cost—up to a certain limit. Such usage limits are applicable during and after the free trial time. Monthly Limits for Free Usage are:
- Network egress—up to 1 GB for each Google Cloud Platform egress destination from North America (not including Australia or China)
- Standard storage—up to five GB-months
- Up to 5,000 Class A operations (active data operations like INSERT and UPDATE)
- Up to 50,000 Class B operations (passive data operations like GET)
In addition, Google Persistent Disks, which offer reliable, high-performance block storage that can be attached to Google Cloud VMs. Persistent Disks cost $0.040 per GB/month for standard magnetic disks, $0.170 per GB/month for SSD, and offer additional options such as additional IOPS and multi-region redundancy.
Learn more in our detailed guide to Google Cloud Storage pricing
Google Cloud Networking Pricing
Here are the pricing models for VPC and Cloud CDN.
Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
VPC costs are calculated according to the type of traffic and storage tiers used.
Ingress traffic
This includes incoming traffic to a Google Cloud resource, including a VM (virtual machine). If you transfer traffic between two virtual machines, then the traffic is deemed egress traffic when departing from one VM and is deemed ingress traffic when it reaches the second VM.
There is no cost for ingress traffic, but you could be charged for the resources that process ingress traffic. Services that use ingress traffic include cloud network address translation (NAT), load balancers and protocol forwarding.
Egress traffic
This includes traffic departing a Google Cloud resource. Egress traffic is billed according to the following:
- Does the traffic utilize an external or internal IP address?
- Does the traffic cross the boundaries of regions or zones?
- Does the traffic remain inside Google Cloud, or leave it?
- How far does the traffic move before leaving Google Cloud?
There are some instances where information transfers are not billed, which may be useful when you plan your deployments. For example, all egress traffic between your VMs and certain non-cloud Google services (such as Doubleclick, YouTube, and Maps) is free even between distinct regions.
This is also true for egress traffic to a distinct Google Cloud service, providing it is within the same location (the exception being GKE, Cloud SQL, Filestore, and Memorystore for Redis). In both instances, neither an external nor internal IP will incur a charge.
However, there are hidden fees depending on the use case. For example, while egress traffic between VMs within the same zone is free, this is only the case if you use the internal IP address. If you use another IP address, Google will bill you as if the traffic were between distinct zones, charging 0.1$ per GB. This could significantly increase costs, particularly in large-scale deployments.
Learn more in GCP Network Pricing: How to Beat the Hidden Fees
Premium and standard tiers
There are two tiers available for information transfers between users and Google Cloud instances:
- Premium tier—leverages Google’s global infrastructure with multiple points of presence (PoPs), routing incoming and outgoing user traffic with optimal performance and minimum congestion.
- Standard tier—utilizes the public internet and carries traffic with public internet service providers (ISPs). It is only accessible in specific regions and offers similar performance to other cloud service providers.
Although the premium tier is set as the default for egress traffic and provides the best performance, it isn’t necessarily the top option when considering cost. The standard tier is more cost effective and is suitable for deployments in a single region. However, there may be a catch that can affect your costs—if you don’t specifically choose the standard tier, the more expensive premium tier will be utilized by default.
Cloud CDN Pricing
The Cloud Content Delivery Network (CDN) utilizes Google’s global network of edge PoPs to cache external HTTP or HTTPS load-balanced data near your users. Caching content at the outer regions of Google’s network offers quicker delivery of information to your users while minimizing serving costs.
Cloud CDN items are priced as follows:
- Requests sent to external backends from Cloud CDN—according to internet egress rates for Compute Engine
- Requests for web cache (HTTP/HTTPS) lookup—$0.0075 for 10,000 requests
- Cache egress—between $0.02 and $0.20 per GB
- Cache fill—between $0.01 and $0.04 per GB
Google Cloud SQL Pricing
The Google Cloud SQL database service is fully managed and can help you set up and maintain relational databases on the Google Cloud Platform.
Pricing for Cloud SQL varies according to your instance type (MySQL and PostgreSQL vs SQL Server). Cloud SQL charges depend on the following elements.
CPU and memory pricing
For a dedicated-core instance, you select the volume of CPUs and the total memory you require, up to 96 CPUs and 624 GB of memory. Pricing for memory and CPUs vary according to the region where your instance is found. Failover replicas and read replicas are billed at the same rate as stand-alone instances.
Storage and networking pricing
Networking and storage prices are based on the instance’s location. When network traffic departs a Cloud SQL instance, the fee applied varies according to the traffic’s destination and, in certain instances, the involvement of a partner. Internet egress is network traffic that departs a Cloud SQL instance to a non-Google client—for example, a local server used to read information from Cloud SQL.
Instance pricing
This is only relevant for shared-core instances. Dedicated-core instances—possessing up to 624 GB of memory and 96 vCPUs—are billed according to the amount of memory and number of cores they have.
Instance pricing is billed for each second that the instance is running, with the activation policy being set to “always”. Cloud SQL regards seconds as the time unit for usage, so every second of usage is part of a full chargeable minute.
Learn more in our detailed guide to Google Cloud SQL pricing
Google Cloud Serverless Pricing
Google Cloud Functions
With Google Cloud Functions, developers create their code, and the rest is done by Google. Thus, IT professionals can develop functions without needing to consider the underlying cloud infrastructure.
Cloud Functions pricing is based on how long your functions run, the number of invocations, and the number of resources you set aside for the function. If your function initiates an outbound network request, there will be added information transfer fees. Cloud Functions features an ongoing free tier for invocations to let you learn about the platform free of charge.
Function invocations
Invocations are billed at a constant rate, irrespective of the invocation source. This encompasses HTTP function invocations via HTTP requests, events forwarded to CloudEvent or background functions, and invocations following on from the call API. The first two million invocations per month are free, and beyond that cost $0.40 per million.
Compute time
Compute time is calculated from the point your function gets a request to the point it completes, either via a timeout, when you signal completion, or through failure or any type of termination.
Cloud Functions may be provisioned as follows (showing Tier 1 costs, available in specific Google Cloud regions including us-west1 and us-central1):
- 128MB memory, 200 MHz CPU—$0.00000231 / second
- 256MB memory, 400 MHz CPU—$0.00000463 / second
- 512MB memory, 800 MHz CPU—$0.00000925 / second
- 1024MB memory, 4 GHz CPU—$0.00001650 / second
- 2048MB memory, 4 GHz CPU—$0.00002900 / second
- 4096MB memory, 8 GHz CPU—$0.00005800 / second
- 8192MB memory,8 GHz CPU—$0.00006800 / second
Networking
Outbound information transfer (information transferred from your function outwards) is calculated in GB and billed at a flat rate. There is no charge for outbound data to different Google APIs in the same region, nor for inbound data. Otherwise, outbound data of up to 5GB per month is free, while outbound egress data is priced at $0.12 per GB.
Google Cloud Run
Google Cloud Run is used to deploy containerized applications on a fully managed serverless platform.
Cloud Run bills you based on the resources you use, calculated up to the closest 100 milliseconds. Each of these resources possesses a free tier. Your overall Cloud Run costs will be the total of the resources in the pricing table.
If CPU is assigned during request processing alone, pricing is as follows (prices are different if CPU is continually assigned; see the official pricing page).
Free tier
- Up to 180,000 free vCPU-seconds per month
- Up to 360,000 free GiB-seconds of memory per month
- Up to two million free requests per month
- Up to 1 GiB free networking egress per month within North America
Tier 1
Beyond the free tier allowance, this tier charges as follows:
- $0.00000250 if idle
- $0.00002400 per vCPU-second, or $0.00001992 with committed use discount (CUD)
- $0.00000250 per GiB-second of memory ($0.000002075 with CUD and $0.00000250 if idle)
- $0.40 per million requests ($0.332 with CUD)
Tier 2
Beyond the free tier allowance, this tier charges as follows:
- $0.00000350 if idle
- $0.00003360 per vCPU-second, or $0.000027888 with committed use discount (CUD)
- $0.00000350 per GiB-second of memory ($0.000002905 with CUD and $0.00000350 if idle)
- $0.40 per million requests ($0.332 with CUD)
Google Cloud Cost Optimization with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, the leading enterprise-grade storage management solution, delivers secure, proven storage management services on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. Cloud Volumes ONTAP capacity can scale into the petabytes, and it supports various use cases such as file services, databases, DevOps or any other enterprise workload, with a strong set of features including high availability, data protection, storage efficiencies, Kubernetes integration, and more.
In particular, Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides storage efficiency features, including thin provisioning, data compression, and deduplication, reducing the storage footprint and costs by up to 70%.
Learn more about how Cloud Volumes ONTAP helps cost savings with these Cloud Volumes ONTAP Storage Efficiency Case Studies.
Learn More About Google Cloud Pricing
Google Cloud Costs: Understanding and Managing Your GCP Bill
The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the three major public clouds. Cost is a key parameter to consider if you are considering migrating to Google Cloud or switching to any other different cloud provider.
Learn how Google Cloud costs work, tools for managing your costs and best practices for reducing your GCP bill
Read more: Google Cloud Costs: Understanding and Managing Your GCP Bill
Google Cloud Storage Pricing: Get the Best Bang for Your Buckets
Google Cloud Storage is priced based on the data storage you consume, network usage and operations you perform on Google Cloud Storage objects, and special retrieval costs if you move data into Google’s low-cost cold storage tiers: Nearline, Coldline and Archive.
Learn how Google Cloud Storage pricing works, the small print behind the service, and how to make the most of your storage buckets at the lowest cost.
Read more: Google Cloud Storage Pricing: Get the Best Bang for Your Buckets
Google Cloud Storage Efficiency: How to Reduce Storage Footprint and Costs with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Cloud Volumes ONTAP provides Google Cloud users with powerful storage efficiency technologies that can significantly reduce storage footprint and costs—in some cases by as much as 70.
In this post we introduce you to the full suite of Cloud Volumes ONTAP storage efficiency features for Google Cloud.
Read more: Google Cloud Storage Efficiency: How to Reduce Storage Footprint and Costs with Cloud Volumes ONTAP
Google Cloud SQL Pricing, and Limits: A Cheat Sheet for Cost Optimization
Google Cloud SQL is a database service that offers managed versions of SQL Server, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. This service can provide significant benefits over on-premises implementations. However, before signing up, you should consider both pricing and its limitations.
This article explains the various pricing breakdowns of SQL database services in Google Cloud, covers the limitations of Google Cloud SQL, and highlights how you can optimize costs with Cloud Volumes ONTAP.
Read more: Google Cloud SQL Pricing, and Limits: A Cheat Sheet for Cost Optimization
Google Cloud Pricing vs AWS: A Fair Comparison?
Google Cloud is the smallest of the big three cloud players but is quickly gaining popularity. When planning a Google Cloud migration, or considering a multi-cloud strategy, it is important to understand each cloud’s service and pricing model, and how to compare pricing correctly.
Understand which Google Cloud and AWS services are comparable on pricing and why, and see pricing for common services side by side.
Read more: Google Cloud Pricing vs AWS: A Fair Comparison?
GCP Network Pricing: How to Beat the Hidden Fees
Google Cloud is the rising star of the public cloud service providers, and as more users turn to its services, the question of how to deal with Google Cloud pricing and costs becomes
This post will look at some of the hidden charges and hard-to-understand billing components that can be associated with transferring your data over the Google Cloud network. Find out how your data will be charged for ingress, egress, the ins and outs of networking service tiers, and how Cloud Volumes ONTAP can help.
Read more: GCP Network Pricing: How to Beat the Hidden Fees
Understanding Google Cloud Storage Costs
Google Cloud Storage is designed to group objects into buckets. A bucket is a cloud-based container that can be assigned one of several storage tiers. Learn about Google Cloud Storage tiers, how they affect your costs, and other elements of storage costs including networking, data operations, and retrieval costs.
Read more: Understanding Google Cloud Storage Costs
See Additional Guides on Key FinOps Topics
Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of FinOps.
AWS Cost Optimization
Authored by Spot
- AWS Cost Optimization Tools and Tips: Ultimate Guide
- AWS Pricing Calculator: Calculate AWS Cost Like the Pros
- AWS Cost Savings: 12 Great Ways to Save on AWS
Azure Pricing
Authored by Spot
- Azure Pricing: The Complete Guide
- Understanding Azure Storage Pricing & Examples for 6 Services
- Azure VM Pricing: VM Types, Pricing Models, and Examples
Azure Cost Optimization
Authored by Spot
