Google Cloud

Network egress is the universal cloud tax

$0.12/GB for internet egress (after first 1 GB free in most regions). A service delivering 1 TB/month of data to users costs ~$120/month in egress alone. This matches AWS rates and is significantly more expensive than Cloudflare R2 (free egress) or Hetzner Cloud (~$0.01/GB).

BigQuery on-demand at $6.25/TB sounds cheap until analysts run unoptimized queries. A single SELECT * on a 10 TB table costs $62.50. Without query cost controls (budget alerts, slot reservations, or maximum bytes billed), a team of 5 analysts can easily generate $500+/month in unexpected BigQuery charges.

Cloud Storage retrieval fees on cold tiers

Nearline retrieval costs $0.01/GB, Coldline $0.02/GB, Archive $0.05/GB. Moving 1 TB from Archive back to active use costs $50 in retrieval fees plus egress. Minimum storage durations (30 days Nearline, 90 days Coldline, 365 days Archive) mean early deletion incurs charges for the full minimum period.

Sustained use discounts (up to 30%) apply automatically but only to Compute Engine VMs running 25%+ of the month. Short-lived VMs (batch jobs, CI/CD runners) do not qualify. Committed use discounts (1-year: ~20% off, 3-year: ~37% off) require upfront commitment with no cancellation option.

GKE (Google Kubernetes Engine) adds a $0.10/hour cluster management fee ($73/month) per cluster on top of the underlying Compute Engine costs. Autopilot mode simplifies management but charges a 20-30% premium over self-managed nodes. A small 3-node GKE cluster (e2-standard-4) costs ~$360/month including the management fee.

Cloud SQL (managed PostgreSQL/MySQL) pricing mirrors Compute Engine but adds ~15% premium for managed features. A db-standard-4 (4 vCPUs, 15 GB RAM) costs ~$0.1615/hour ($116/month). High availability doubles this. Automatic backups are charged at $0.08/GB/month for storage beyond 7 days retention.

The $300 free credit for new accounts expires after 90 days. Many teams sign up, experiment for a month, and lose $200+ in unused credits because they did not deploy production workloads fast enough.

Premium support starts at $12,500/month or 4% of monthly GCP spend (whichever is higher). Standard support is free but offers no guaranteed response times. Enhanced support ($500/month or 3% of spend) gives 4-hour response for critical issues. This is comparable to AWS but still a meaningful hidden cost for production workloads.