GCP Billing SKU Dictionary
Search Google Cloud billing SKUs in plain English: what triggers the charge, what unit it bills in, what it costs by region, and how to make it smaller. The price list tells you the rate; this tells you the cause.
Browse by service
Networking
5Egress, load balancing, NAT, and interconnect — the charges that surprise people most.
BigQuery
4Analysis, storage, streaming, and the APIs around them.
Cloud Storage
4Object storage classes, operations, retrieval, and early deletion.
Compute Engine
5vCPU, RAM, disks, GPUs, licences, and IP addresses — billed as separate SKUs.
Kubernetes Engine
1Cluster management fees, and the Compute Engine charges underneath.
Cloud SQL
1Instance vCPU/RAM, storage, backups, HA, and licensing.
Cloud Run
1Request-based and instance-based billing, and the difference between them.
Cloud Logging
1Ingestion and retention — the classic silently-growing bill.
Vertex AI
1Training, prediction endpoints, and generative model tokens.
Support
1Percentage-of-spend charges that scale with everything else.
Why this exists
Google publishes a complete price list at cloud.google.com/skus. It is accurate, exhaustive, and answers a question almost nobody is asking. When an engineer sees Network Internet Egress from Americas to China on a bill, they do not want the rate — they want to know what in their system sent bytes to China, whether the amount is normal, and how to make it smaller. That is what these 24 write-ups are for.
Frequently asked questions
What is a SKU on a Google Cloud bill?
A SKU is the smallest unit Google charges for. One virtual machine appears as several SKUs — vCPU, RAM, disk, licence, IP address — because each is billed separately. That is why a bill grouped by service tells you far less than a bill grouped by SKU.
Where can I find the SKU ID for a charge?
In the billing export, sku.id and sku.description carry it. In the console billing reports, group by SKU. The description is the string worth searching for — it is the human-readable name and the one that appears on invoices.
Why does my egress cost differ between two SKUs that look the same?
Egress is priced by lane. "Network Internet Egress from Americas to China" and the same charge to Europe are separate SKUs at materially different rates, and both are separate again from inter-region and inter-zone traffic inside Google.
How is this different from cloud.google.com/skus?
Google's page is a searchable price list: SKU ID, description, region, rate. It tells you what something costs and never what caused it. These pages add the part that is missing — what triggers the charge, what it usually means when it grows, and what to do about it.
Knowing what a SKU is beats not knowing. Knowing which of yours is growing is better.
Finitizer breaks your bill down to the SKU, tracks how each one moves week to week, and tells you which movements are usage and which are rate changes — across Google Cloud, AWS, and BigQuery.