Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
Instance Ram running
The memory half of a virtual machine, billed per gibibyte-hour alongside the vCPU SKU.
On memory-optimized families this line is usually larger than the CPU one, which is worth knowing before assuming CPU is where the money goes.
Billed: Per gibibyte-hour of memory, priced per machine family and region. Separate from the vCPU SKU.
What triggers this charge
- Every hour a VM runs, proportional to its provisioned memory rather than its used memory.
- Memory-optimized machine families (M-series), where the per-gibibyte rate and the quantity are both high.
- Custom machine types, where memory can be scaled independently, and often was, upward, during an incident and never back down.
How to reduce it
Right-size against observed working set
Provisioned memory is billed whether or not it is touched. Compare peak actual usage over a month against what is allocated.
Use custom machine types where they avoid a size up
Predefined types force a fixed CPU-to-memory ratio. A custom type buys what the workload needs instead of the next size up, but its vCPU and memory cost 5% more than the predefined equivalent, and memory past the series' standard ratio bills at a higher extended-memory rate. It pays when it removes more than that 5%.
Check the family fits the workload
A memory-optimized family for a CPU-bound job pays a premium for memory the workload never uses.
Rates
For a dated list price, use the GCP Sustained & Committed Use Discount Calculator (prices verified 1 Nov 2026).
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against VM instance pricing and general-purpose machine type pricing.
- Rates verified:
- not yet. No rate is shown on this page until one is loaded from the Cloud Billing Catalog API.
Related charges
Now find out how much of this you are actually paying.
Finitizer breaks your Google Cloud bill down to the SKU, shows how each one has moved since last week, and separates rate changes from usage changes, so you know whether to talk to engineering or to procurement.
See how Finitizer works