gcp
95 articles on gcp — what drives the cost, how it is priced, and where the savings actually are.
GCP Firestore cost: you pay per read, write, and delete
Firestore bills per document operation (reads about $0.06 per 100k, writes about $0.18, deletes about $0.02) plus storage and egress, with a daily free tier. Query patterns, not data size, drive the bill. Here is how to keep operations down.
GCP Memorystore cost: you pay for provisioned capacity per hour
Memorystore for Redis bills per GB of provisioned capacity by the hour, by tier (Basic or Standard with a replica). Capacity, not usage, sets the bill, so right-sizing the instance and choosing the tier are the levers. Here is how it prices.
GCP Cloud NAT cost: hourly fee plus data processed
Cloud NAT charges an hourly fee plus about $0.045 per GB processed, similar to AWS and Azure NAT. Traffic to Google APIs can skip it with Private Google Access, cutting the data line. Here is how it prices and how to reduce it.
GCP Cloud Armor cost: policies, rules, and requests
Cloud Armor bills per security policy (about $5/month), per rule (about $1/month), and per million requests processed (about $0.75), with Managed Protection Plus adding a subscription. Here is how the standard model prices and what drives the bill.
GCP Artifact Registry cost: storage plus egress, like ECR
Artifact Registry charges about $0.10 per GB-month of storage (first 0.5 GB free) plus network egress for downloads. In-region pulls to Google compute are cheap; cross-region and internet pulls add transfer. Here is the breakdown and how to trim it.
GCP Cloud CDN cost: cache egress, cache fill, and lookups
Cloud CDN bills cache egress to users (tiered by region), cache fill from the origin, and a small per-request lookup fee. A high cache-hit ratio lowers both origin load and cost. Here is the breakdown and how to raise hit ratio.
Data transfer cost across clouds: the line item that varies most
Compute and storage have converged, but data transfer hasn't. Here's the shared structure (ingress free, egress tiered, cross-region charged), where AWS/Azure/GCP diverge, and the universal levers to cut it.
GCP Bigtable cost optimization: the per-node floor that decides it
Bigtable bills nodes (~$474/month each, minimum one) + storage. The node floor makes it expensive below scale. Here's how to tune nodes, SSD vs HDD, and when a cheaper datastore wins.
How to reduce your cloud bill: the checklist that works, in order
Delete waste, right-size, commit the baseline, use Spot, tier storage, cut egress, then keep it down with a cost gate. A practical, impact-ordered checklist with links to the details for each step.
GCP load balancer cost: forwarding rules and data processing
GCP load balancers bill forwarding rules (~$18/month each for the first five) plus data processed. Here's why sprawl drives the bill and how URL maps and a CDN cut it.
AWS vs Azure vs GCP cost: why no cloud is universally cheapest
Comparable compute and storage sit in a narrow band across the three clouds. The real differences are egress, the discounts you'll commit to, and managed services. Here's how to compare apples-to-apples.
GKE Autopilot cost optimization: you pay for requests, not usage
Autopilot bills pod resource requests (~$0.0445/vCPU-hour), not nodes, so oversized requests are the overspend. Here's how to right-size requests, use Spot Pods, and pick compute classes.
GCP Cloud Storage classes cost: Standard vs Nearline vs Coldline vs Archive
GCS classes trade storage price for access price, with minimum durations of 30/90/365 days. Here's the full breakdown and how to match the class to access frequency with lifecycle rules.
Cloud Functions vs Cloud Run cost: why concurrency tips it
Cloud Functions 2nd gen runs on Cloud Run, so rates converge, but Cloud Run's concurrency lets one instance serve many requests, making it cheaper for request-heavy workloads. Here's how to choose.
GCP persistent disk types cost: pd-standard vs balanced vs ssd
Persistent disks bill per provisioned GB-month by type: pd-standard ~$0.04, pd-balanced ~$0.10, pd-ssd ~$0.17. Here's which to use, why you pay for provisioned size, and how to stop over-paying for SSD.
GCP Spot VMs: 60-91% off if you design for preemption
Spot VMs run 60-91% below on-demand for the same machine type, preemptible at any time. Here's what belongs on Spot, how it differs from preemptible, Spot GKE pools, and how to design for preemption.
Cloud SQL vs AlloyDB cost: when the faster database is also cheaper
AlloyDB costs more per vCPU than Cloud SQL but is much faster for analytical workloads, so it can need less compute for the same performance. Here's how each bills and which to pick.
BigQuery cost: on-demand vs slots, and how to stop scanning terabytes
BigQuery on-demand bills ~$6.25/TB scanned; capacity bills for slots. Here's which model is cheaper for your query volume, and why partitioning and never SELECT * is the biggest saving on either.
GCP network egress cost explained: ingress is free, everything out costs
GCP charges for egress to the internet, between regions, and even between zones, but not ingress or same-zone traffic. Here's the egress map, the three patterns that drive the bill, and how to cut it.
Cloud Run vs GKE cost: when serverless beats a node pool
Cloud Run bills per request-second and scales to zero; GKE bills for nodes 24/7. The cheaper option comes down to utilization. Here's the crossover, the min-instances trap, and where Autopilot fits.
GCP Committed Use Discounts vs Sustained Use Discounts
SUDs are automatic (30% off steady workloads). CUDs require commitment (25-55% off). They don't stack. Here's the math, the break-even, and the optimal strategy: 3-year flexible CUDs on baseline, SUDs above, Spot for elastic.
GKE Standard vs Autopilot: which mode for your workload
Autopilot bills per-pod (vCPU, memory, ephemeral storage). Standard bills per-node. The break-even is around 50-55% node utilization. Here's the actual pricing math with n2-standard-4 nodes, when each mode wins, and how to migrate without surprises.
How to estimate GCP costs from Terraform
Estimate Google Cloud costs from Terraform configurations with sustained-use discounts applied automatically, Committed Use Discounts via usage file, and Spot VMs detected from the resource. No GCP credentials required.