Google’s own pricing calculator asks you to pick a machine type before it tells you anything useful, which is backwards if you’re still deciding whether you even need a VM. Our GCP cost calculator below skips that step: enter rough usage across 8 service categories and get a monthly estimate immediately, with no Google account required.
Quick facts
- Covers 8 Google Cloud service categories: compute, storage, database, networking and CDN, security and identity, DevOps and CI/CD, messaging, and monitoring.
- Priced off us-central1 (Iowa) on-demand rates; switch regions in the tool for a rough adjustment.
- An e2-medium VM runs $0.0553 an hour, about $40.38 a month, before any discount is applied.
- Shows a second “optimized” estimate that accounts for Google’s automatic sustained use discount.
Try the calculator
Choose the services you’re estimating, enter usage, and the total updates as you type.
GCP Cost Calculator
Use this Google Cloud cost calculator to estimate your monthly GCP bill across Compute Engine, persistent disk and Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL database, networking and Cloud CDN, security, Cloud Build CI/CD, Pub/Sub messaging, and Cloud Monitoring. See your Google Cloud cost optimization potential from rightsizing and Committed Use Discounts. It is a free, fast cloud cost optimization tool for Google Cloud.
- Compute$0
- Storage$0
- Database$0
- Networking & CDN$0
- Security & Identity$0
- DevOps & CI/CD$0
- Messaging$0
- Monitoring$0
Estimates use approximate on-demand prices for general-purpose resources across each service line and are for planning only. Cloud pricing changes often and varies by region and configuration — verify with each provider's official calculator before making decisions. Savings figures are illustrative.
A mixed workload, priced with real rates
Here’s a setup that comes up constantly in early architecture reviews: one e2-medium Compute Engine instance, 500 GB in Cloud Storage Standard class, and a db-standard-1 Cloud SQL instance running MySQL.
The VM costs about $40.38 a month at $0.0553 an hour. Storage adds roughly $10 for 500 GB. And Cloud SQL is the heavy line item again: $49 a month for compute alone, before storage, backups, or IOPS get added on top.
That’s already around $100, and no data has moved anywhere yet. Egress to the internet costs $0.12 per GiB for the first 10 TiB each month, after the first 100 GB free. An app serving 1 TB of downloads a month adds roughly $108 in egress, which nearly matches the VM and Cloud SQL combined.
The one thing GCP does differently
Most comparisons treat the big three clouds as interchangeable with different logos. One real difference is worth knowing before you build a budget: Google applies sustained use discounts automatically, with no reservation to buy and no commitment to sign.
Run a VM for more than 25% of a billing month and each additional hour starts earning a discount, scaling up to 30% off the resource cost for a VM that runs the full month, according to Google’s own documentation. AWS and Azure both require you to actively purchase a Reserved Instance, Savings Plan, or Reservation to get anywhere near that saving. On GCP, a workload that just runs continuously gets a chunk of the discount for free.
That’s a genuine point in GCP’s favor, and it’s also the reason this calculator’s “optimized” number for Google Cloud tends to sit closer to its “estimate” number than the AWS or Azure versions do. There’s simply less manual optimization needed to capture the easy savings.
Where the official calculator still wins
None of this makes Google’s own Cloud Pricing Calculator redundant. It handles committed use discounts, flexible CUDs across machine families, and sustained use math with more precision than a quick tool like ours can, and it ties directly into an actual GCP project if you have one.
What it’s slow for is the first five minutes of a conversation, before anyone has decided on a machine family or committed to a region. That’s what this page is for. Get the rough number here, then move to Google’s calculator once the architecture is real enough to need exact figures.
FAQ
Does the GCP cost calculator include sustained use discounts automatically?
The “optimized” figure factors in typical sustained use savings for workloads that run continuously. The base “estimate” shows the undiscounted on-demand rate, since not every workload runs long enough to qualify.
Is Google Cloud cheaper than AWS or Azure?
Not universally. Compute pricing is close across all three on comparable machine types; Google’s egress pricing and automatic sustained use discounts are where it tends to pull ahead for steady, long-running workloads with meaningful data transfer.
Can I use this calculator for a BigQuery cost estimate?
Not directly. BigQuery bills by data scanned per query or by flat-rate slots, which is a different pricing model than the per-hour resources this tool covers. See our BigQuery cost optimization guide for that calculation.
Sources
- Holori GCP VM pricing calculator: e2-medium
- Google Cloud: Cloud Storage pricing
- Google Cloud: Sustained use discounts documentation
- Bytebase dbcost: Google Cloud SQL db-standard-1 pricing
Written by the FinOpsDaily editorial team. Last updated: November 2026. Pricing shown is for us-central1 (Iowa) on-demand rates and changes periodically; confirm current rates against Google Cloud’s own pricing pages before budgeting.
