Cloud Billing documentation

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

A Cloud Billing account defines who pays for a given set of Google Cloud resources. To use Google Cloud services, you must have a valid Cloud Billing account, and must link it to your Google Cloud projects. Your project's Google Cloud usage is charged to the linked Cloud Billing account.

You must have a valid Cloud Billing account even if you are in your free trial period or if you only use Google Cloud resources that are covered by the Google Cloud Free Tier.

You also need a Cloud Billing account to pay for your use of the Google Maps Platform APIs.

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Documentation resources

Find quickstarts and guides, review key references, and get help with common issues.

Getting started

Manage your billing account

Cost management tools

Explore self-paced training from Google Cloud Skills Boost, use cases, reference architectures, and code samples with examples of how to use and connect Google Cloud services.

Understanding your Google Cloud costs

Learn how to view your invoice, track your Google Cloud costs with Billing reports, analyze your billing data with BigQuery or Google Sheets, and create custom billing dashboards with Looker Studio.

Optimizing your Google Cloud costs

Learn about ways to control and optimize your costs, such as setting up budgets and alerts, managing quota limits, and taking advantage of committed use discounts.

Beyond your bill: video series

Beyond your bill goes over topics that help you understand, control, and optimize your Google Cloud costs.

Cost management: video series

Get best practices for monitoring, controlling, and optimizing your costs with Google Cloud's cost management tools.

Financial governance in the cloud

Best practices for understanding, controlling, optimizing, and managing your IT costs to create a path to predictable cloud costs.

Billing for Google Maps Platform: video series

Using Google Maps Platform APIs requires a Cloud Billing account. Learn how to get started with Google Maps Platform, including setting up your Cloud Billing account, enabling APIs, generating API keys, and optimizing your costs with quotas and budgets.