Cloud Billing is a collection of services and tools that helps you track, understand, pay for, and optimize your costs on Google Cloud and Google Maps Platform.
Required for all services: You must have an active Cloud Billing account linked to your Google Cloud projects to use any Google Cloud or Google Maps Platform service, including services within the Free Tier.
Cost visibility: Gain insight into how your usage translates to costs.
Cost control: Implement controls to prevent unexpected expenses.
Cost optimization: Find opportunities to reduce your cloud spend.
Key components and relationships
- Cloud Billing account: This defines who pays for a given set of Google Cloud resources. It's linked to a Google Payments profile. You might have one or multiple billing accounts depending on your needs.
- Google Payments profile: This is managed in the Google Payments Center and includes your payment methods (like credit cards or bank accounts), address, and tax information.
- Google Cloud projects: Your resources (like virtual machines, storage, databases) are organized within projects. Each project must be linked to a Cloud Billing account to function. A single billing account can pay for many projects.
Learn more about resource organization and access management.
Types of Cloud Billing accounts
There are two main types of billing accounts:
- Self-serve (online): Costs are automatically charged to your linked payment method. This can happen when your costs reach a certain threshold or on a regular monthly cycle. Most new users start with this type.
- Invoiced (offline): You receive a monthly invoice for your accrued costs and pay by using check or bank transfer. This option typically requires meeting certain eligibility criteria.
Find out your Cloud Billing account type and charging cycle.
Manage your account and find out your costs
Once you have a Cloud Billing account, you'll need to manage it and understand how to track your spend.
Basic account management
Common tasks include:
- Create a new self-serve Cloud Billing account
- View projects linked to your billing account
- Enable, disable, or change billing for a project
- Add, remove, or update payment methods
- Get your invoice, statement, or payment receipt
- Close or reopen a Cloud Billing account
Control who can access billing
Google Cloud uses Identity and Access Management (IAM) to control access to Cloud Billing. The creator of the billing account is automatically granted the Billing Account Administrator role. A Billing Account Administrator can grant different roles to users or groups, such as:
- Billing Account Administrator: Full control over the billing account.
- Billing Account Viewer: Can view costs and transactions.
- Billing Account User: Can link projects to the billing account.
It's important to set these permissions carefully to ensure the right people have the right level of access.
Learn about Cloud Billing access control and permissions. You can also Create custom roles for Cloud Billing.
View your costs
The Google Cloud console provides several tools to help you understand your spend:
- Billing reports: See your cost trends, filter by project, service, SKU, and labels, and see the impact of credits. This is the primary tool for understanding what drives your costs. Learn to use Billing Reports.
- Cost Table: Get a detailed, tabular view of your costs for an invoice or statement. This is useful for reconciliation. View the cost details of your invoice.
- Cost Breakdown: See an at-a-glance view of your costs after savings, helping you understand the net effect of credits and discounts. Understand your savings with cost breakdown reports.
Monitor and optimize your cloud spend
Beyond cost visibility, Cloud Billing helps you actively control and reduce your expenses.
Set budgets and spending alerts
To avoid surprises on your bill, you can create budgets.
- Track planned versus actual spend: Monitor your charges against a target amount you set.
- Scope: Budgets can apply to the entire billing account, specific projects, services, or labels.
- Alerts: Set thresholds (for example, at 50%, 90%, and 100% of your budget amount) to trigger email notifications to key stakeholders when costs exceed these points.
Budgets don't automatically cap your spend, but they provide crucial warnings.
Learn how to Create, edit, or delete budgets and budget alerts.
View and manage cost anomalies
Anomaly detection helps you manage unexpected costs across your billing account's projects. Anomalies are spikes or deviations in usage costs that differ from your expected spend.
Access the Anomalies dashboard to do the following:
- Investigate the root causes of anomalies.
- Customize your view by setting thresholds for cost impact amount and percent of deviation.
- Manage automated alerts and notifications for detected anomalies.
Learn more about anomaly detection for costs
Optimize costs (FinOps)
Cloud Billing tools support your Financial Operations (FinOps) journey, helping you maximize business value from the cloud. Key optimization levers include:
- FinOps Hub: Discover personalized recommendations to optimize costs and track your FinOps health. Explore the FinOps hub.
- Committed Use Discounts (CUDs): Receive deeply discounted prices in exchange for committing to a consistent amount of usage or spend over one or three years. Ideal for stable workloads. Analyze your CUD effectiveness.
What's next
- Dive deeper into the fundamental concepts in the Cloud Billing overview.
- Try the Interactive tutorials in the Google Cloud console.
- Create a billing account.
- Monitor costs using billing reports.
- Optimize costs with FinOps hub.