Committed use discounts

This document provides information about committed use discounts (CUDs) for Google Cloud and how they apply for various services.

CUDs provide discounted prices for eligible Google Cloud resources in exchange for purchasing committed use contracts (also known as commitments). When you purchase Google Cloud commitments, you commit to either using a minimum level of resources or spending a minimum amount, for a term duration of one or three years.

CUDs for Google Cloud are broadly available as spend-based or resource-based CUDs and cover a wide range of services and resources. You can choose the type of commitment that you want to purchase depending on the service that you use and whether you have predictable or unpredictable resource needs.

Spend-based commitments

Spend-based CUDs provide a discount in exchange for your commitment to spend a minimum amount for any of the services listed in this section. The discount applies to the set of eligible resources for each service.

With spend-based commitments, you commit to spending on eligible resources or services that are worth a specified minimum amount of on-demand price, per hour, throughout the commitment's term of one or three years. In return, you receive discounted rate on the minimum spend amount that you commit to. Any overage usage that takes your hourly spend amount over your committed amount is charged at the on-demand rate.

Spend-based CUDs apply to eligible usage in any projects that the Cloud Billing account pays for.

Depending on the Google Cloud service that you use, you can purchase spend-based commitments in one of the following ways:

  • Compute flexible commitments
  • Service-specific spend-based commitments

Compute flexible commitments

Compute flexible commitments are ideal for scenarios where you have predictable Google Cloud spend needs that span usage beyond a single service. Compute Flexible CUDs apply to your spend across one or more of the following services:

  • Compute Engine
  • Google Kubernetes Engine
  • Cloud Run

You can purchase a single flexible commitment to cover your eligible spend across all three services. For more information about how Compute flexible CUDs apply to each service, see the service-specific CUDs documentation:

Service-specific spend-based commitments

These commitments are ideal for scenarios where you have predictable spend needs within a Google Cloud service. You must purchase these commitments separately for each Google Cloud service and CUDs from these commitments apply only to spend within that service. You can get spend-based CUDs for the following Google Cloud services:

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL committed use discounts are spend-based CUDs that apply to all AlloyDB for PostgreSQL instance vCPU and memory usage. The discount applies to AlloyDB for PostgreSQL instances in any project or region that is associated with a single Cloud Billing account.

AlloyDB for PostgreSQL commitments do not apply to storage, backup, and network egress.

For current rates, see AlloyDB for PostgreSQL pricing.

Backup and DR Service

Backup and DR (for VMware Engine) committed use discounts apply to the combined node usage in a region. This gives you low, predictable costs, without the need to make any manual changes or updates yourself. They apply to VMware Engine backups in the regions where the service is available and to which you have committed.

For current rates, see Backup and DR pricing.

Backup for GKE

Backup for GKE committed use discounts are spend-based CUDs that apply to Backup for GKE backup management, that is Pods per plan in a region. Committed use discounts don't apply to backup storage (GiB) or inter-region data transfer (GiB).

For current rates, see Backup for GKE CUDs pricing.

Bigtable

As a Bigtable customer, you can purchase a commitment to receive a committed use discount on the price of Bigtable nodes. The discount applies to nodes in any project or region that is associated with a single Cloud Billing account. The discount does not apply to the cost of storage, backup storage, or network egress. For details, see Bigtable committed use discounts. For current rates, see Bigtable pricing.

Cloud Run

Cloud Run committed use discounts apply to all aggregated Cloud Run CPU, memory, and request usage in a region, giving you low, predictable costs when your code is running in one of the supported container ecosystems. Cloud Run commitments do not apply to networking changes.

For current rates, see the Cloud Run pricing details.

Dataflow

Dataflow committed use discounts apply to your spending on the Dataflow compute capacity used by streaming jobs across projects. The discount applies to any eligible usage in Dataflow projects associated with the Cloud Billing account used to purchase the commitment, regardless of instance configuration or region. All CUDs apply to both regional and multi-region configurations.

The discount doesn't apply to the cost of worker CPU and memory for batch and FlexRS jobs, Dataflow Shuffle data processed, Data Compute Units (DCUs) for batch jobs, Persistent Disk storage, GPUs, snapshots, and confidential VMs.

For current rates and other details, see Dataflow pricing.

Spanner

Spanner committed use discounts apply to all Spanner compute capacity associated with a single Cloud Billing account, regardless of region. This includes all instances in all projects, whether configured as single-region or multi-region instances.

Spanner CUDs do not apply to Spanner storage, backup, or network egress.

For current rates and other details, see Spanner pricing.

Cloud SQL

Cloud SQL committed use discounts provide you the flexibility to use any machine shapes with the supported Cloud SQL database engines, without having to modify your commitments. They apply to all Cloud SQL database instance vCPU and memory usage for the service in the region you purchased the commitments, except shared CPU machine types (such as db-f1-micro and db-g1-small). The commitments apply to usage from all supported database engines, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.

Cloud SQL commitments do not apply to persistent disk snapshots, storage, IP addresses, network egress, or licensing.

For current rates, see Cloud SQL pricing.

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes

Google Cloud NetApp Volumes committed use discounts apply to the aggregate storage capacity on Flex, Standard, Premium, and Extreme service levels and regions at your billing account level. CUDs can keep your storage costs low when you have predictable storage needs. NetApp Volumes CUDs are'nt available for volume replications and backups.

For current rates, see NetApp Volumes pricing.

Google Cloud VMware Engine

VMware Engine committed use discounts apply to aggregate VMware Engine node usage in a region, giving you low, predictable costs, without the need to make any manual changes or updates yourself. They apply to VMware Engine node CPU and memory usage in the regions where the service is available and you have committed.

Current rates and supported regions for Google Cloud VMware Engine CUDs are detailed on the VMware Engine pricing page.

Google Kubernetes Engine

Google Kubernetes Engine (Autopilot Mode) committed use discounts apply to all Autopilot Pod workload vCPU, memory, and ephemeral storage usage in the region in which you have purchased commitments. Google Kubernetes Engine (Autopilot Mode) CUDs don't apply to the cluster management fee or to GKE Standard mode compute nodes.

For current rates, see the Google Kubernetes Engine pricing details.

Memorystore

Memorystore CUDs apply to Memorystore for Redis, Memorystore for Redis Cluster, and Memorystore for Memcached usage. A Memorystore CUD gives you the flexibility to use Redis, Redis Cluster, or Memcached instance spending towards a commitment on a single Cloud Billing account.

Memorystore commitments don't apply to Cloud Storage storage for backups, network egress, or Memorystore for Redis M1 capacity tier instances (less than 5 GB).

For current rates, see the following pages:

Resource-based commitments

Resource-based CUDs are available only for Compute Engine. Compute Engine resource-based CUDs provide discounts in exchange for committing to using a minimum amount of Compute Engine resources in a specific region and a project. These CUDs are ideal when you have predictable resource needs. You can purchase Compute Engine resource-based commitments for the following hardware and software resources for a term duration of one or three years:

  • vCPUs
  • Memory
  • GPUs
  • Local SSD disks
  • Sole-tenant nodes
  • Operating system (OS) licenses

Commitments for hardware resources are separate from the ones for OS licenses. You can purchase both categories of commitments for the same virtual machine (VM) instance, but you cannot purchase a single commitment that covers both hardware resources and licenses.

For current rates, see VM instance pricing.

Spend-based versus resource-based commitments

The following table demonstrates the differences between spend-based and resource-based CUDs, using Compute Engine as the example service.

Spend-based CUDs Resource-based CUDs
Spend-based commitments for Compute Engine are purchased and measured in terms of the dollars per hour of equivalent on-demand spend. Resource-based commitments for Compute Engine are purchased and measured in terms of the underlying vCPU, memory, GPU, and Local SSD disk resources.
Spend-based commitments are purchased from your Cloud Billing account; they apply to eligible usage in any projects paid for by that Cloud Billing account.

Resource-based commitments are purchased in the context of an individual project, rather than that of a Cloud Billing account.

You can enable discount sharing so that Compute Engine resource-based CUDs are shared across all projects that are paid for by the same Cloud Billing account.

You can change the Cloud Billing account that pays for the project where you purchased the resource-based commitments. Learn about changing the Cloud Billing account for projects.

View your commitments and discounts

To view your spend-based and resource-based CUDs in the dashboard, complete the following steps:

  1. In the Google Cloud console, open the Committed use discounts (CUDs) page for Billing.

    Go to Committed use discounts (CUDs)

  2. At the prompt, choose the Cloud Billing account for which you want to view commitments.

The Committed use discounts (CUDs) dashboard displays a list of all the commitments, across services, that are associated with your Cloud Billing account. You can view which of your commitments are expiring in the next 30 days. You can also specify your resource-based commitments to automatically renew at the end of their ongoing terms by changing the setting in the Auto-renew column.

For information about viewing spend-based CUDs, see Viewing spend-based commitments.

For information about viewing resource-based CUDs, see Viewing resource-based commitments.

Pricing for commitments

You are billed a monthly fee for the commitments you purchase. This fee is calculated when you purchase the commitments, based on the list price on the date you made the purchase. This monthly fee applies to your purchased commitments for the entire duration of the commitment period. Future changes to the list prices don't affect your commitment fee during the commitment period.

To understand how your commitment fees and credits are applied to your Cloud Billing account and projects, see Attribution of committed use discount fees and credits.

Pricing for CUDs is unique for each Google Cloud product:

Purchase commitments

To purchase spend-based commitments, see Purchasing spend-based commitments.

To purchase resource-based commitments for Compute Engine, see one of the following, depending on your use case: