Cloud Logging Cost Calculator

Q: How much does Google Cloud Logging cost?

$0.50 per GiB stored in a log bucket, after the first 50 GiB per project each month, and that price includes 30 days of retention. Keeping logs longer adds $0.01 per GiB a month. VPC Flow Logs, firewall and Cloud NAT logs are $0.25 per GiB stored with no free allotment, plus $0.25 per GiB to generate them, billed by VPC networking. So 100 GiB a day of application logs in one project, kept 30 days, costs about $1,496 a month: 3,042 GiB less 50 free, at $0.50.

Q: How much does CloudWatch Logs cost?

In US East (N. Virginia), $0.50 per GB ingested in the Standard log class and $0.25 in Essentials (formerly Infrequent Access), $0.03 per GB a month to store, on compressed bytes, and $0.005 per GB scanned by Logs Insights, with 5 GB of each free. Log groups never expire by default: 100 GB a day, compressed to a fifth, adds about 608 GB of storage every month, so the storage line grows by $18 a month for as long as nobody sets a retention. Intelligent Tiering, an account setting since July 2026, bills logs untouched for 30 days at $0.018 a GB and for 90 days at $0.006.

Q: How is Datadog log pricing calculated?

Two charges. Ingestion is $0.10 per GB of uncompressed logs, for every log sent. Indexing is per million events, by retention: $1.06, $1.27, $1.70 and $2.50 for 3, 7, 15 and 30 days on an annual plan, and 50% more on demand. At 1 KB an event a GB is a million events, so indexing it for 15 days costs 17 times its ingestion. Indexing fewer logs is usually the biggest lever.

Q: How do I reduce logging costs?

In this order: drop the logs nobody reads, such as debug output and health checks; sample high-volume logs; use the provider's own lever (one log bucket per entry on Google, Essentials log groups and Intelligent Tiering on CloudWatch, indexing fewer logs on Datadog); shorten searchable retention; and archive what you must keep to object storage. Dropping comes first because every later charge is billed on what is left. Check what audit, security and incident response need before you drop anything.

Q: Is it cheaper to keep old logs in Cloud Storage or S3?

For long retention, much cheaper. A GiB kept in Cloud Logging past 30 days costs $0.01 a month; in Cloud Storage Archive it costs $0.0012, with a 365-day minimum. CloudWatch stores compressed logs at $0.03 per GB a month, or $0.006 once untouched for 90 days with Intelligent Tiering; S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is $0.004 and Glacier Deep Archive $0.00099. Reading logs back from an archive costs extra, and takes hours from Deep Archive.

See your log bill on Google Cloud Logging, CloudWatch or Datadog, and what filtering, sampling and shorter retention save.

Multi-cloudCalculator60 seconds

New here? See what this tool does and how to use it.

Where your logs goEach is priced on its own charges.

Start from a scenario

Each one fills in the fields below for a typical workload of that kind. You can change any of them.

Your logs today

Log volume a dayAll projects together, leaving out the free _Required bucket: the Logs Storage page, or Cloud Logging usage in the billing report divided by days.

GiB a day

Retention todayAny number of days from 1 to 3,650. The first 30 are included in the storage price.

days

ProjectsProjects that store logs in their own buckets: each gets 50 GiB free a month. Logs routed to a central project use its 50 GiB.

Network logsVPC Flow Logs, firewall and Cloud NAT logs: $0.25 a GiB to generate, billed by VPC networking, plus $0.25 a GiB stored, with no free allotment.

10%

Log buckets each entry is stored inA second sink to another log bucket, such as an org-level one, stores and bills the same entries again.

The changes, in order

Drop debug and noisy logsThe share of volume nobody reads: debug output, repeated errors, health checks.

20%

Sample high-volume logsThe share of what is left that is high-volume and worth sampling, such as access or flow logs.

30%

Share of sampled logs kept

10%

Searchable retention afterUp to 30 days costs nothing extra.

days

ArchiveA sink copies what you keep to Cloud Storage, as plain JSON.

Archive storage classColder classes cost less to keep, more to read back, and bill a minimum number of days.

Monthly, with the changes$888.75

Today: $1,495.83/mo
Saves: $607.09/mo
Share of today's bill: 41%

Google Cloud Logging list prices, the same in every region.

Estimate coverage: high. Google Cloud Logging list prices read from the provider's own pricing on 1 Nov 2026. Volume and the shares are your estimates.

The changes save

$607.09/mo

From $1,495.83 to $888.75 a month on Google Cloud Logging, 41% less, $7,285.05 a year. The biggest saving: sample high-volume logs, $328.50 a month.

The bill, line by line

Logging storage is 90% of today's bill.

Charge	Today	With changes
Logging storage2,738 GiB a month, less 50 GiB free, at $0.50 per GiB. Includes 30 days.	$1,343.75	$774.35
Network logs storage304 GiB of VPC Flow, firewall and Cloud NAT logs stored at $0.25 per GiB, no free allotment.	$76.04	$44.41
Network logs generation304 GiB generated at $0.25 per GiB, falling above 10 TiB a month. Billed by VPC networking, even for logs a sink excludes.	$76.04	$44.41
Retention past 30 daysNone: the first 30 days are included in storage.	$0.00	$0.00
Archive in Cloud Storage Archive21,316 GiB held at $0.0012 per GiB a month.	None	$25.58
Total	$1,495.83	$888.75

What each change saves, and how

1. Exclude debug and noisy logs
Add an exclusion filter to the _Default sink, for example severity<=DEBUG. Excluded entries are never stored, so Logging never bills them. For VPC Flow Logs, firewall and Cloud NAT logs, lower the flow log sample rate or log fewer rules instead: an exclusion stops the $0.25 storage charge, not the $0.25 generation charge.
$304.17
2. Sample high-volume logs
Add an exclusion filter for the source ending in sample(insertId, 0.9): it excludes 90% of matching entries and stores 10%. For VPC Flow Logs, firewall and Cloud NAT logs, lower the flow log sample rate or log fewer rules instead: an exclusion stops the $0.25 storage charge, not the $0.25 generation charge.
$328.50
3. Store each entry in one bucket
Each entry is stored in one bucket already.
None
4. Shorten searchable retention
The first 30 days are included, so shorter retention saves nothing here.
None
5. Archive what you keep
Create a sink to a Cloud Storage bucket in Cloud Storage Archive, with a lifecycle rule to delete after 1 year. The Log Router is free; you pay for the storage.
Adds $25.58

Each saving is measured after the changes above it, so they add up to the total. After dropping and sampling, 58 of 100 GiB a day still arrive.

Before you drop, sample or shorten anything, check what audit, security and incident response need: a dropped log cannot be read back. Data Access and Policy Denied audit logs are stored, and billed, in _Default; flow and firewall logs are often what an incident review needs.

The same logs on each provider

Today’s volume and retention priced on each provider’s own charges, the other two with their plain settings. What you get differs: Google includes queries, CloudWatch bills each GB a query scans, Datadog bills search per event indexed. A cross-check, not a migration quote: moving has costs of its own, such as shipping logs out of the cloud that makes them.

Google Cloud LoggingYour bill today, as entered.	$1,495.83/mo
Amazon CloudWatch Logs30 days in the Standard class, Intelligent Tiering off, 20% compressed, no queries counted.	$1,536.18/mo
DatadogEverything indexed for 30 days, 1,000-byte events, annual prices.	$7,908.33/mo

What this model assumes

Show

Each provider bills different things. Google bills each GiB once in each log bucket that stores it, 30 days included, then $0.01 a GiB a month; network logs also pay VPC networking for being generated. CloudWatch bills each GB as it arrives, then compressed storage for as long as it is kept, then every GB a query scans. Datadog bills every GB ingested and, apart, every million events it indexes.
Steady state. Storage is priced once the bucket, log group or index holds a full retention period: volume a day times days kept. A new retention takes that long to show in full.
One volume, each provider’s own gigabyte. Google bills GiB; AWS and Datadog bill GB. The gap is under 7.4%, less than any estimate of daily volume. Datadog counts uncompressed bytes.
The changes stack in order. Dropped and sampled logs are gone: they reach neither the provider nor the archive. On Google, network logs are assumed cut where they are generated, so both their charges fall. Archives are Cloud Storage in Iowa for Google and S3 in US East for the others, billed for each class’s minimum days. Reading them back is not included.
Not included: Datadog Flex Logs (Flex compute is priced on request), CloudWatch outside US East, Live Tail, data protection, log centralization copies and Firehose delivery, sinks to BigQuery or Pub/Sub (billed there), Log Analytics queries billed in BigQuery, and egress. Google’s _Required bucket of audit logs is free and not counted.

Rates used

Google Cloud Logging storage and retention, read 1 Nov 2026.
Google Cloud network telemetry (VPC Flow, firewall, Cloud NAT logs), read 1 Nov 2026.
Amazon CloudWatch Logs, US East (N. Virginia), read 1 Nov 2026.
Datadog Log Management, US site, read 1 Nov 2026.

Archive classes use this site’s Cloud Storage (Iowa) and S3 (US East) rate tables.

Prices verified 1 Nov 2026. Public list prices in USD for Google Cloud, AWS US East, Datadog US, before any discount you have negotiated.

Logging bill growing faster than traffic?

Cloud Cost Audit: We review your log buckets, sinks and log groups, and find the volume nobody reads. From $1,500, fixed. Nothing paid upfront.

Talk to Finitizer

Questions

How much does Google Cloud Logging cost?

$0.50 per GiB stored in a log bucket, after the first 50 GiB per project each month, and that price includes 30 days of retention. Keeping logs longer adds $0.01 per GiB a month. VPC Flow Logs, firewall and Cloud NAT logs are $0.25 per GiB stored with no free allotment, plus $0.25 per GiB to generate them, billed by VPC networking. So 100 GiB a day of application logs in one project, kept 30 days, costs about $1,496 a month: 3,042 GiB less 50 free, at $0.50.

How much does CloudWatch Logs cost?

In US East (N. Virginia), $0.50 per GB ingested in the Standard log class and $0.25 in Essentials (formerly Infrequent Access), $0.03 per GB a month to store, on compressed bytes, and $0.005 per GB scanned by Logs Insights, with 5 GB of each free. Log groups never expire by default: 100 GB a day, compressed to a fifth, adds about 608 GB of storage every month, so the storage line grows by $18 a month for as long as nobody sets a retention. Intelligent Tiering, an account setting since July 2026, bills logs untouched for 30 days at $0.018 a GB and for 90 days at $0.006.

How is Datadog log pricing calculated?

Two charges. Ingestion is $0.10 per GB of uncompressed logs, for every log sent. Indexing is per million events, by retention: $1.06, $1.27, $1.70 and $2.50 for 3, 7, 15 and 30 days on an annual plan, and 50% more on demand. At 1 KB an event a GB is a million events, so indexing it for 15 days costs 17 times its ingestion. Indexing fewer logs is usually the biggest lever.

How do I reduce logging costs?

In this order: drop the logs nobody reads, such as debug output and health checks; sample high-volume logs; use the provider's own lever (one log bucket per entry on Google, Essentials log groups and Intelligent Tiering on CloudWatch, indexing fewer logs on Datadog); shorten searchable retention; and archive what you must keep to object storage. Dropping comes first because every later charge is billed on what is left. Check what audit, security and incident response need before you drop anything.

Is it cheaper to keep old logs in Cloud Storage or S3?

For long retention, much cheaper. A GiB kept in Cloud Logging past 30 days costs $0.01 a month; in Cloud Storage Archive it costs $0.0012, with a 365-day minimum. CloudWatch stores compressed logs at $0.03 per GB a month, or $0.006 once untouched for 90 days with Intelligent Tiering; S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval is $0.004 and Glacier Deep Archive $0.00099. Reading logs back from an archive costs extra, and takes hours from Deep Archive.

More tools for: Storage and lifecycle

One estimate. Your bill has the real volume.

Finitizer reads your Google Cloud and AWS billing data every day, shows which projects and accounts drive the logging line, and tracks what each change saves once it is made.

See how Finitizer works

Cloud Logging Cost Calculator