App Engine Pricing

Pricing is different for apps in the standard environment and the flexible environment. Apps in both environments may also incur charges from other Google Cloud products, depending on which products they use in addition to App Engine.

Standard environment pricing

Apps in the standard environment have a free quota for App Engine resources. Any use of App Engine resources beyond the free quota incurs charges as described in this section.

To estimate costs for App Engine resources in the standard environment, use the pricing calculator.

The following table summarizes the hourly billing rate that applies after an app surpasses its free quota. The billing rate depends on the instance class you specify for your app.

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Accrual of instance hours begins when an instance starts and ends as described below, depending on the type of scaling you specify for the instance:

• Basic or automatic scaling: accrual ends fifteen minutes after an instance finishes processing its last request.
• Manual scaling: accrual ends fifteen minutes after an instance shuts down.

If the number of idle instances created by App Engine exceeds the maximum you specify in the Performance Settings tab of the Cloud Console, the excess instances do not accrue instance hours.

Important: When you view your bill, you will not see the names of the individual instance classes in your billing line items. Instead, you see instance hours from the "B" classes reported as "Backend Instances", and instance hours from the "F" classes reported as "Frontend Instances". The bill will apply the appropriate multiple of instance hours for each instance class you use. For example, if you use an F4 instance for one hour, you see "Frontend Instance" billing for four instance hours at the F1 rate.

Network resources in the standard environment

The following table summarizes the billing rates for App Engine network resources in the standard environment.

^* Excludes traffic from the URL Fetch service to Google APIs at *.googleapis.com.

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Legacy App Engine resources

The resources listed in the following table are only available in the Java 8, PHP 5, and Python 2 runtimes in the standard environment. Apps that use these services will need to migrate to an equivalent Google Cloud product or a third-party service before they can run in newer App Engine runtimes.

^* Blobstore can use Google Cloud Storage buckets to store blobs, including the App Engine default bucket. Costs follow the pricing for Google Cloud Storage Multi-Regional buckets.

^**For a detailed description of each type of Search API call, refer to the Java and Python documentation.

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Flexible environment pricing

App Engine does not provide free quota in the flexible environment.

Apps running in the flexible environment are deployed to virtual machine types that you specify. These virtual machine resources are billed on a per-second basis with a 1 minute minimum usage cost.

Billing for the memory resource includes the memory your app uses plus the memory that the runtime itself needs to run your app. This means your memory usage and costs can be higher than the maximum memory you request for your app.

The following table summarizes the hourly billing rates of the various computing resources in the flexible environment.

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Pricing for related Google Cloud products

App Engine uses Cloud Build to build and deploy apps. Cloud Build has its own quotas, and each time you deploy your app to App Engine you use some of this quota. Cloud Build provides a free quota, so you won't incur costs for deploying App Engine apps until you surpass the free quota. For information about Cloud Build quotas and pricing, see Cloud Build Pricing.

The following list provides pricing information for Google Cloud resources that are frequently used by App Engine apps:

• Memorystore for Redis pricing
• Serverless VPC Access for Memorystore
• Cloud Storage pricing
• Cloud Logging pricing
• Cloud Tasks pricing
• Pub/Sub pricing

Managing billing

You must be a project owner to be a billing administrator and complete basic billing tasks. For more information, see the support help page on how to Manage billing administrators.

Billing settings

When you create a Google Cloud project, add a billing account and enable billing. App Engine requires all projects to provide a valid payment instrument. You will only be charged for computing resources that are above the free quotas.

If you already have a billing account when you create a project, billing is enabled for that project by default. If you have more than one billing account when you create a project, you must select an account to associate with your project. If you don't have a billing account when you create a project, then you must add a billing account and enable billing for that project.

If you disable an app, you should also disable billing for that app, as the app can still be charged for fixed billing costs, like datastore storage.

Spending limits

Older App Engine apps could create spending limits in the standard environment to specify an approximate maximum amount you can be charged for using App Engine resources.

Spending limits are deprecated. As of December 12, 2019, you can no longer create new spending limits, and existing spending limits will be removed on on July 24, 2021. For information about other mechanisms to manage costs, see managing costs.

Understanding billing

To view your app's charges, in the Google Cloud Console, go to Billing. Select the billing account, then go to the History page.

Only billing administrators can view the transaction history. No paper invoices are sent to the billing contact.

The transaction history shows all account activity related to resource charges and payments. The report uses the US Pacific timezone.

Note: Daily usage costs are rounded to the penny when they are displayed in the App Engine dashboard, but the transaction history accumulates the actual full costs. Therefore the sum of the daily charges may not be identical to the amount reported (and billed) in the transaction history. Daily usage is posted on dashboard the next day but it can take longer to update the transaction history, so the transaction history may not include the most recent usage history.

Daily and monthly charges

Charges are posted daily and monthly:

• Daily: Every day you are charged for the resources you actually use. Usage up to the free quota limits is included in the usage total, but not in the billable amount. Usage above the free quota is charged at the regular rates.
• Monthly: At the beginning of each month all daily charges for the previous month are summed, applicable taxes are computed, and the total charges are debited from the payment method that is linked to the app.

Taxes

Some countries tax App Engine fees. If taxes apply in your country of residence, your bill will include any applicable taxes. Note that the spending limit does not include taxes. Taxes are added to your charges after daily spend has been calculated, so the final charge to your account may be larger than the spending limit amount. To see any taxes in your bill, in the Google Cloud Console, go to Billing. Select the billing account, then go to the History page to view the transaction history.

Grace periods

You can view your app's current billing status in the App Engine dashboard in the Cloud Console. If a payment fails, the app's account is delinquent and enters a grace period status. You have until the end of the grace period to pay the outstanding balance. During the grace period, the app will continue to run with its budget constraints. If payment is not received, your quotas may be reverted to the default levels.

To clear the outstanding charges you can go to the Transaction History page where you can click Make a Payment. You may need to go to the Billing Settings page first, where you can add another payment source or correct a problem with an existing account, such as an expired card. If payment succeeds, the billing status will change to Billing Enabled.

Try it for yourself

If you're new to Google Cloud, create an account to evaluate how App Engine performs in real-world scenarios. New customers also get $300 in free credits to run, test, and deploy workloads.

Try App Engine free

Help

• See the Cloud Billing guide for more information.

• Report billing problems to Cloud Services by filling out this online form.