GCP Billing SKU Dictionary

A SKU is the smallest unit Google charges for. One virtual machine appears as several SKUs, vCPU, RAM, disk, license, 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.

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 here; it is the human-readable name and the one that appears on invoices. Pasting a SKU ID finds a page only for the few IDs mapped so far from Google's own pricing pages.

Each write-up says when its explanation was last checked against Google's documentation and links the pages it was checked against. Rates are separate: they appear only after a sync from Google's Cloud Billing Catalog API, and until then no page shows one. For current list prices, use cloud.google.com/skus.

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.

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.