Google Cloud Cost Calculators

Google Cloud prices several things on a basis that catches out anyone who learned cloud cost on AWS, and the differences are large enough to reverse a decision rather than merely shift it.

Cloud Storage is the clearest case. The class rates look like S3's — four tiers, colder is cheaper, minimum durations apply. What differs is the operation charge. On S3 the per-request rates vary modestly between classes; on Google they vary by an order of magnitude. An Archive Class B operation costs $0.05 per thousand against Standard's $0.0004 — one hundred and twenty-five times as much. So a Google archive tier that is read even occasionally can lose on operations alone while its storage line still looks like a saving, and the class with the lowest per-gigabyte rate is frequently not the cheapest class.

Cloud Run has two billing models rather than one, and choosing between them is worth more than any tuning within either. Requests-based billing charges CPU only while a request is in flight, at a third more per second, and adds a per-request fee. Instance-based charges every second the instance exists, at the lower rate, and nothing per request. The decision therefore turns on what share of instance time is spent actually serving — a utilisation question, not a traffic-volume one.

And the discounts are their own subject. Sustained use is automatic, applies per quarter of the month, and is convex — half a month of uptime earns nowhere near half the maximum discount. Committed use does not stack on top of it: covered usage bills at the committed rate and forfeits the sustained-use discount it would otherwise have earned. Comparing a commitment against list price rather than against sustained use is the standard error, and it can make a commitment that loses money look like a saving.

One honest limitation, stated on the page rather than hidden: Compute Engine's machine-type rate table is rendered in the browser and cannot be read from any public endpoint, so the discount calculator asks for your on-demand rate instead of guessing it. Everything else here is read from Google's own pricing documentation and dated.