Google Cloud Pricing

Google Cloud Pricing Overview

Google Cloud offers a flexible pricing structure, allowing businesses of all sizes to choose the right model for their workloads. Whether you’re a startup looking to explore cloud services or an enterprise scaling operations, understanding Google Cloud’s pricing is essential for managing costs effectively.

Key pricing models include:

Google Cloud Free Tier & Free Trial

The Free Tier is Google Cloud’s introductory program, designed to help users explore services at no cost. It includes:

90-Day, $300 Free Trial

New users can access $300 worth of Google Cloud credits, valid for 90 days. This trial includes most services but excludes certain premium resources like GPUs and high-memory instances.

Free Tier products

The Free Tier products offer limited usage of certain Google Cloud services without any cost. This is ideal for low-usage applications or for developers who want to test the platform over an extended period. Key services included are:

…and more.

This free program enables users to try services risk-free and assess which tools best meet their business needs.

Google Maps Platform Credits

Google Maps Platform users receive a recurring $200 monthly credit for each Maps-related Cloud Billing account. This helps offset costs for Maps, Routes, and Places services.

Program Coverage and Restrictions

Free Trial credits cover most Google Cloud resources but exclude actions like adding GPUs, requesting quota increases, and creating specific types of VM instances. The Free Tier provides ongoing access to limited resources across various services, which are not charged against Free Trial credits.

Google Cloud’s Free Program, comprising the 90-day Free Trial and ongoing Free Tier, offers a risk-free way to explore and utilize its cloud services. With tools for cost estimation and management, users can effectively control expenses while benefiting from Google Cloud’s robust infrastructure. Whether you’re a new user looking to test the waters or an established business aiming to explore new innovations, Google Cloud’s Free Program provides a valuable starting point.

Pay-As-You-Go

Google Cloud’s Pay-as-you-go pricing model ensures that you only pay for the resources you actually use. This flexible pricing scheme suits businesses with dynamic workloads, as it charges by the second for services like compute and storage.

Example Pricing:

Compute Engine (VMs)

Cloud Storage

Google Cloud VPS Pricing

For those considering Google Cloud as a VPS (Virtual Private Server) solution, the cost largely depends on the type of instance you select, such as the n1-standard-1 or e2-micro configurations. These are affordable for small projects or low-traffic websites.

Sustained Use Discounts

To help reduce costs for continuous usage, Google Cloud offers Sustained Use Discounts. This discount model applies automatically when certain resources (like Compute Engine) are used for more than 25% of the billing month. Discounts can reach up to 30% depending on the duration of resource use.

For example:

Committed Use Contracts

For companies with predictable resource needs, Committed Use Contracts offer deep discounts (up to 57% off) in exchange for a one- or three-year commitment. This pricing model is beneficial for workloads that remain consistent over time.

How Committed Use Works:

Google Cloud Pricing Calculator

One of the most helpful tools provided by Google is the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator. This allows businesses to estimate their monthly costs based on the services they plan to use. It offers granular control, enabling users to input details about the amount of compute, storage, and network resources they expect to consume.

For example, if you’re planning to use Google Cloud for storage:

Google Cloud Pricing by Service

Google Cloud offers a diverse range of services, each with distinct pricing models based on usage, performance, and storage needs. This section explores the costs of popular services like Compute Engine, App Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Functions, and storage solutions like Persistent Disk and Cloud Bigtable. It also covers networking options such as Virtual Private Cloud and Content Delivery Network.

Understanding these pricing structures helps businesses select cost-efficient configurations that align with their workload demands and budget.

Google Cloud Pricing for Computing Services

Let’s have a look at Google Cloud Pricing for some of its popular computing services.

Google Cloud Compute Engine Pricing

The cost of Compute Engine services varies depending on the type of instance. Below are some common configurations:

Google Cloud’s Compute Engine is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) that allows businesses to run workloads on Google’s infrastructure using customizable virtual machines (VMs). Pricing is largely determined by the VM type and duration of use.

For example, the n1-standard-1 instance costs around $0.10 per hour in the U.S., while high-memory options like n1-highmem-2 can cost approximately $0.20 per hour.

Additional features such as disk storage, network usage, and services like load balancing incur extra fees.

Preemptible VMs provide significant savings but may be interrupted if Google Cloud needs the resources for other purposes.

Google Cloud App Engine Pricing

Google Cloud’s App Engine is a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allows developers to build and host web applications while handling all infrastructure management. It uses a pay-per-use pricing model, where costs depend on factors like instance hours, network egress, and storage.

In the standard environment, the smallest instance, F1, costs approximately $0.05 per hour, while larger instances like B4 are priced around $0.22 per hour.

App Engine also offers a free tier, with up to 28 free instance hours per day for basic usage.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is a managed service for running containerized applications using Kubernetes, an open-source platform created by Google.

Pricing includes both Compute Engine costs for worker nodes and a management fee for Kubernetes master nodes, which is about $0.10 per cluster per hour (waived for the first cluster in each zone).

Cloud Functions

Cloud Functions, a Function-as-a-Service (FaaS), charges based on invocations, compute time, and network egress.

The first 2 million invocations per month are free, with additional invocations costing $0.40 per million. Compute time is priced per GB-second.

Google Cloud Pricing for Storage Solutions

Storage plays a significant role in cloud expenses. Let’s explore the pricing of key Google Cloud storage solutions including Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk, Cloud Bigtable, and Cloud SQL. Each service offers different pricing models based on usage, performance, and data retention requirements, allowing businesses to select the most cost-efficient option depending on their storage needs and access patterns.

Understanding the cost structure of these solutions is essential for optimizing cloud storage expenses.

Google Cloud Storage Pricing

Cloud Storage is Google’s scalable and reliable object storage service. Pricing is based on the amount of data stored and the network resources used for transferring that data. There are multiple storage classes, each with different costs:

To optimize costs, it’s important to understand your data access frequency and choose the appropriate storage class accordingly.

Persistent Disk

Persistent Disk is Google Cloud’s block storage solution designed for applications that need fast read and write speeds on large datasets. Pricing is based on the disk’s provisioned size, with two main types:

You are charged for the entire provisioned size, even if it’s not fully used. Additional costs may include snapshot storage and network egress fees.

Cloud Bigtable

Cloud Bigtable is Google’s NoSQL database service designed for large-scale data handling, from single-row transactions to petabytes of data.

Pricing is determined by the number of nodes in your cluster, the amount of storage, and network egress. For instance, each node in the U.S. costs $0.72 per hour, and storage is $0.19 per GB-month. Additional fees may apply for storage beyond the free node allocation, network usage, and backups.

It’s important to assess your workload to accurately estimate costs.

Cloud SQL

Cloud SQL is Google’s fully managed relational database service that supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. Pricing depends on several factors, including the database engine, instance type (shared or dedicated), and region.

For example, a MySQL instance in the U.S. starts at $0.0122 per hour. Additional costs include storage, networking, automatic backups, and replicas, which are billed separately.

The final cost varies depending on resource allocation and specific usage requirements.

Google Cloud Pricing for Networking

Virtual Private Cloud

Google Cloud’s Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) offers a secure, private network for cloud resources. While VPC itself is free, costs arise from the resources you run, like VMs, and data transfer.

Ingress data (incoming) is free, but egress data (outgoing) incurs charges based on destination. For instance, transferring data between zones in the same region costs $0.01 per GB, while regional transfers vary, such as $0.02 per GB in Europe.

Transferring data to the internet or another provider costs $0.045 to $0.085 per GB.

Content Delivery Network

Google Cloud’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) speeds up content delivery by distributing data across cache servers globally. CDN pricing is based on cache fill (data sent from origin servers to the CDN) and cache egress (data delivered to users).

In North America, cache egress starts at $0.20 per GB, and cache fill starts at $0.04 per GB, with rates decreasing as usage grows.

To use Cloud CDN, HTTP(S) Load Balancing is required, costing $0.0075 per 10,000 requests. Storage and compute resources are billed separately.

Cost Management Tools and Best Practices

Google Cloud provides several tools to help manage and reduce costs:

Cost Optimization Strategies

Here are some best practices for optimizing your Google Cloud costs:

Google Cloud Pricing Summary

Google Cloud’s pricing structure is designed to offer flexibility, transparency, and cost savings to businesses of all sizes. Whether you are just starting with the 12-month free trial and Always Free tier, or you require more advanced features with pay-as-you-go pricing, sustained use discounts, or committed use contracts, Google Cloud provides a comprehensive set of options to meet your needs.

By leveraging Google Cloud’s pricing calculators and cost management tools, businesses can effectively plan and control their cloud expenses, ensuring they only pay for what they use. For those with predictable workloads, committed use contracts offer an excellent way to achieve significant savings. With a range of cost optimization strategies, Google Cloud empowers users to maximize their budget and achieve more with their cloud investment.