Compute Engine costs
Resource Details
Estimation
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Estimate your GCP bill in three steps
Configure your workloads
Select machine families (e.g. N1, N2, C2) or database configs and choose your GCP region. Rates vary by region — us-central1 is typically the cheapest baseline.
Set usage and quantity
Enter how many days per month each instance runs and how many instances you need. A 24/7 workload is 730 hours per month; dev environments often run far less.
Compare and decide
Evaluate Committed Use Discounts (1-yr or 3-yr CUDs) against On-Demand pricing to see instant savings and totals updated live.
CHOOSE A CALCULATOR
Which Google Cloud service are you pricing?
Compute Engine
Virtual machines billed on vCPU and memory. Size instances, compare machine families, and weigh committed use against on-demand and Spot.
Open the Compute Engine calculator →Cloud SQL
Managed MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server. Price an instance together with its storage, backups, and high availability standby.
Open the Cloud SQL calculator →BigQuery
Serverless analytics billed on bytes scanned or reserved slots. Compare on-demand querying against capacity pricing and storage tiers.
Open the BigQuery calculator →PRICING MODEL
How Google Cloud pricing works
Google Cloud bills almost everything by consumption rather than by a flat monthly fee, and the unit of consumption differs sharply between services. Compute Engine charges vCPU and memory by the second, Cloud SQL charges a provisioned instance plus the storage attached to it, and BigQuery charges either the data your queries scan or the slot time you reserve. Because the units differ, a single monthly figure is only meaningful once each service has been estimated on its own terms.
Two factors cut across every service. The first is region: the same resource carries different rates in different locations, and the cheapest region for compute is not always the cheapest for storage. The second is commitment, since Google discounts heavily in exchange for predictability through committed use discounts on compute and databases and through capacity reservations on BigQuery. Network egress sits outside both and is billed on traffic leaving Google Cloud, which is the line item that most often surprises teams after launch.
What drives your Google Cloud bill
Service mix
Most bills are dominated by two or three services rather than spread evenly. Estimating the largest contributors accurately matters far more than pricing every small component precisely.
Region
Rates differ by location for compute, storage, and databases alike. us-central1 is often the cheapest baseline, while Asia-Pacific and South American regions typically carry a premium.
Commitment and discounts
Committed use discounts cut compute and database rates in exchange for a one or three year term. Sustained use discounts apply automatically to eligible compute with no commitment at all.
Storage and retention
Storage is billed on what is provisioned or retained rather than what is actively read. Backups, snapshots, and untouched BigQuery tables each follow their own retention pricing.
Network egress
Traffic leaving Google Cloud, and traffic crossing between regions, is billed separately from the resources that generate it. It is the most commonly underestimated line on a first bill.
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