Paste a line item from your invoice and find what it bills for, across the Google Cloud services covered so far.
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. Standard inbound data transfer is generally free, though processing charges such as Cloud NAT or load balancer data processing can still apply to it.
Billed: Per gibibyte leaving Google Cloud to the internet. Premium Tier is priced by source and destination and tiered by monthly volume, counted per SKU across the billing account; Standard Tier by source region. Standard inbound data transfer is generally 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.
- Telemetry and monitoring agents shipping data to a third-party SaaS, and replies to external uptime monitors. 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
Bytes served from the Cloud CDN cache are billed under Cloud CDN pricing rather than these internet egress rates, and a cache hit avoids the origin request entirely. Cache fill and cache lookups have their own charges, so it pays where the hit rate is high. For static assets and media this is usually the biggest lever.
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 to 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
Sources and review
- Explanation reviewed:
- 1 Nov 2026, against Google Cloud networking 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