Google Earth Engine pricing
Google Earth Engine is a platform for scientific analysis and visualization of geospatial datasets for academic, non-profit, business and government users. Google Earth Engine hosts satellite imagery and stores it in a public data archive that includes historical earth images going back more than forty years. The images, ingested on a daily basis, are then made available for global-scale data processing. Google Earth Engine also provides APIs and other tools to enable the analysis of large datasets.
Overview of Google Earth Engine pricing
The pricing model is based on consumption of Earth Engine resources (compute units and storage) and a monthly subscription fee. Earth Engine Compute Units (EECUs) consist of Earth Engine managed workers used to execute customer tasks. There are two kinds of EECUs: "Batch" and "Online." Batch EECUs are typically used for very large jobs (for example, exports), and online EECUs provide near-real-time responses in the Code Editor, apps, etc. One EECU-hour is an online or batch managed worker executing customer tasks for one hour. Earth Engine automatically records the number of EECUs used to complete an analysis as requests are processed.
Google Earth Engine pricing has two main components:
On-demand pricing for compute and storage - is the cost to process and store data in Earth Engine. Storage is charged by GB-month. Compute pricing is charged by EECU-hour and rates vary which processing environment you use:
- Online: run computations synchronously and include the output directly in the response.
- Batch: run computations asynchronously and output results for later access (in Google Cloud Storage, the Earth Engine asset store, etc.).
Monthly subscription - This pricing model offers access to additional developer seats, credits to compute and storage consumption, and access to premium features.
On-demand pricing for compute and storage
Usage is billed using the on-demand pricing model, where you pay for the data processing and storage. On-demand pricing is as follows:
| US-Central-1 | |
|---|---|
| Operation | Pricing |
| Online | $1.33 per EECU-hour |
| Batch | $0.40 per EECU-hour |
| Storage | $0.026 per GB-month |
| Users | First user free, $500 per month for each additional user* |
| If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply. |
*Please see subscription packages for more options
Pricing details
Note the following regarding on-demand charges:
An Earth Engine Compute Unit (EECU) is a mechanism for representing an amount of instantaneous processing power. Earth Engine tracks the total computational footprint of tasks as a function of their EECU usage through time (EECU-seconds, EECU-hours, etc.). Because Google has many different types of processor cores, architectures, etc., EECUs are a useful abstraction for talking about computational power.
While EECU-seconds measure the amount of work that Earth Engine is performing, EECU-seconds do not correspond directly to CPU-seconds due to the fully managed nature of the service.
The number, type and architecture of machines working on a particular result can change over time. Because different physical cores can have different performance characteristics, we abstract all processing using EECUs.
Sending the same (or similar) requests to Earth Engine can sometimes result in very different amounts of computation. Common drivers of differences include:
Caching, such as reusing the results of previous computations (including partial or intermediate results)
Different underlying data, such as varying numbers of satellite images, geometries of different complexity, etc.
Algorithm changes on the Earth Engine platform, including performance optimizations, bugfixes, etc.
Changes to client libraries, particularly if you depend on other users' Earth Engine code or packages
The interactive environment is composed of different API endpoints: standard and high volume:
Standard endpoint: The standard endpoint is appropriate for most human-driven usage, and it's what powers the Code Editor and Earth Engine Apps. Specifically, this endpoint is best suited for latency-sensitive applications which involve a low volume of concurrent, non-programmatic requests.
High-volume endpoint: The high-volume API endpoint is designed to handle more requests in parallel than the standard endpoint, with the tradeoff of higher average latency and reduced caching. The high-volume API is often the best choice when making many requests programmatically.
Monthly Subscriptions
Earth Engine offers three subscription packages based on planned level of usage
| Individual | Basic | Professional | Premium | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Fee | None | $500 per month | $2000 per month | Contact us |
| User (developer) allowance | 1 | 2 | 5 | Unlimited |
| Batch EECU credit | No credits included | 100 EECU-hour per month credit included | 500 EECU-hour per month credit included | Contact us |
| Online EECU credit | No credits included | 10 EECU-hour per month credit included | 50 EECU-hour per month credit included | Contact us |
| Earth Engine Cloud storage credit | No credits included | 100 GB credit included | 1TB credit included | Contact us |
| Higher QPS on High-Volume | Not available | Not available | Included | Included |
| SLA | Not available | Not available | Included | Included |
Pricing details
Note the following regarding monthly subscriptions:
- Subscription fees are charged monthly and credits are refilled at the beginning of every billing cycle and prorated for partial months.
- Once credits are depleted, standard on-demand consumption rate applies.
- Premium subscriptions allocations can be customized. Please contact your Google Sales representative for more information.
- Additional discounts for committed use or high usage tiers are available. Please contact your Google Sales representative for more information.
- For Professional and Premium subscriptions, the default High-Volume API request quota is increased to 500 concurrent requests.
- Billing support is provided for every package tier.
Data ingestion and extraction pricing
Data extraction is available at no charge until Q4 '22 and will be priced based on standard network Egress fee for Google Cloud starting later this year. Data ingestion is available at no additional charge.
Non-Commercial research
Google Earth Engine remains available at no additional cost for nonprofit organizations, research scientists, and other impact users for their non-commercial and research projects. Please see here for more information.
If you would like to get started using Earth Engine, click