Cloud Billing overview

Cloud Billing is a collection of tools that help you track and understand your Google Cloud spending, pay your bill, and optimize your costs.

This document covers the following topics:

  • An introduction to Cloud Billing tools.

  • An introduction to Cloud Billing accounts, and the relationship between Cloud Billing accounts, Google payments profiles, and Google payments accounts. Your Cloud Billing account accrues and calculates costs for your usage of resources and services in Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, Firebase, and Google AI Studio. These costs are routed to a Google payments account to pay your bill.

About Cloud Billing tools

The tools in Cloud Billing help you monitor your usage costs, forecast your spending, and identify opportunities to save on costs.

Get started

  • Take an interactive tour of Cloud Billing. If you're new to Google Cloud, this tutorial walks you through the basics of understanding and managing your costs using the Google Cloud console.

    Launch the Cloud Billing tour

  • View your billing reports and cost trends. The billing report helps you answer questions like "Which Google Cloud services (such as Compute Engine or Cloud Storage) cost me the most?".

    Launch the Cloud Billing reports tour

Pay your bill

Monitor costs

  • Export your billing data to BigQuery. Export your usage and cost data to a BigQuery dataset, and use the dataset for detailed analyses. You can also visualize your exported data in tools such as Data Studio.

    We recommend enabling the BigQuery export as early as possible, so that the data reflects your Google Cloud usage from the beginning.

    Launch the Cloud Billing export to BigQuery tutorial

  • Create a budget and set up spending alerts. Use budgets to track your actual Google Cloud spend against your planned spending. Then, set up alerts to stay informed of your spending.

    Launch the tutorial to learn about creating budgets

  • Review anomalies for your projects. Anomalies are spikes or deviations in usage costs that differ from your expected spend, when compared to historical spending patterns. The Anomalies dashboard displays all cost anomalies associated with your projects, within the linked billing account.