Network Internet Egress
This is data your workload sends out of Google Cloud to the public internet. It is billed per gibibyte, at a rate that depends on where the traffic is going, and it appears as a separate SKU for every source-to-destination lane. Nothing you receive is charged — only what you send.
Billed: Per gibibyte leaving Google Cloud to the internet, tiered by monthly volume and priced by destination continent. Ingress is free.
What triggers this charge
- Every byte of an HTTP response your service returns to a browser or mobile client, including headers, JSON payloads, and error responses.
- File downloads from Cloud Storage over a public URL or signed URL.
- Replication or backup to anything outside Google Cloud, including another cloud.
- Health checks, telemetry, and monitoring agents shipping data to a third-party SaaS. These are small per call and continuous, which is how they escape notice.
- Destination matters, and the spread is wide: traffic to China and Australia is billed at materially higher rates than traffic to North America or Europe.
How to reduce it
Put a CDN in front of anything cacheable
Cloud CDN egress is billed at cache-egress rates rather than origin-egress rates, and a cache hit avoids the origin request entirely. For static assets and media this is usually the single biggest lever available.
Compress responses
Egress is billed on bytes on the wire. Enabling gzip or Brotli on JSON and text responses routinely cuts the billed volume by 60–80% for no architectural change.
Find out where it is actually going
The lane is in the SKU description. Group your billing export by SKU rather than by service and the expensive destination usually becomes obvious — it is frequently one integration nobody remembered.
Move chatty consumers inside the perimeter
A partner pulling data over the public internet can often use VPC Peering, Private Service Connect, or a shared bucket instead, which changes the applicable SKU entirely.
Rates
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.