GCP calculators

GCP costs usually come down to measurable drivers: GB-month stored, request volume, outbound transfer, and log ingestion. Use these tools to budget and compare scenarios.

GCP cost guides All calculators Methodology

A practical GCP estimate

  1. Start with measurable drivers (requests/month, GB/month, GB-month, hours).
  2. Separate internet egress, inter-zone, and cross-region transfer.
  3. Model logs/metrics as ingestion + retention + scan/query.
  4. Validate boundaries (internal vs internet) before trusting totals.
Networking Logging Storage Kubernetes

Common pitfalls

  • Under-modeling inter-zone transfer (it can be frequent in multi-zone architectures).
  • Confusing CDN bandwidth with origin egress (cache fill vs edge delivery).
  • High-cardinality metrics labels creating “quietly growing” bills.
  • Ignoring storage growth and lifecycle transitions (hot → cold → archive).

Start with estimation checklist if you’re missing major line items.

How to get your inputs

  • Requests: Cloud Monitoring metrics for Load Balancer, API Gateway, or app dashboards.
  • Transfer: Cloud Billing export usage types and VPC Flow Logs (GB).
  • Storage: Cloud Storage metrics and billing exports for GB-month and requests.
  • Logs: Cloud Logging ingestion and retention settings (log buckets).
Object storage cost
GB-month + request fees with your pricing assumptions.
Data egress cost
Outbound GB/month × $/GB for planning scenarios.
Log cost
Ingestion + retention + scan/query (driver-based).
Kubernetes cost
Node sizing + surrounding line items checklist.
API request cost
Estimate request-based charges with per-1k assumptions.
Response transfer estimator
Convert RPS and payload size into GB/month transfer.
Compute instance cost
Instance count × $/hour × uptime.
Database storage growth
Model GB-month growth for managed databases and warehouses.

Result interpretation (GCP)

  • Separate internet egress from inter-zone and cross-region transfer before tuning rates.
  • For storage, track average GB-month and lifecycle transitions rather than end-of-month size.
  • Log and metric costs scale with ingestion and query scan volume, not just storage size.
  • Request-heavy services usually spike from retries and fan-out; validate request math early.
  • Use the estimate to compare scenarios, then validate against billing exports.

Scenario planning (GCP)

  • Baseline: typical traffic, average cache hit rate, and stable log volume.
  • Peak: 2x-4x requests and egress for product launches or incidents.
  • Regional split: separate multi-zone and cross-region transfer rates.
  • Storage growth: model a growth curve and lifecycle transitions.
  • Query spikes: increase log scan volume when incidents or audits happen.

Validate after changes (GCP)

  • Compare estimated drivers to Cloud Billing export usage types.
  • Verify inter-zone and cross-region transfer after routing changes.
  • Check log ingestion and bucket retention settings in Cloud Logging.
  • Review a recent week of billing exports to confirm the model.
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Next steps

For step-by-step estimation checklists and pitfalls, browse GCP cost guides.