
Ask HN: How much do you pay for Google Cloud? - andreigaspar
I migrated to GCP a couple months ago, and I love it. Super convenient, great services.<p>But boy oh boy, every time I check that billing tab it gives me a mini heart attack. I am scared to look anymore, the damn thing gives me anxiety.<p>I got two Kubernetes clusters with small instances for two of my side projects, and a VM for automation stuff.<p>One month the forecasted cost was over $800 ... I panicked, I cut as many corners as possible. This month I got an invoice for $250+ ... which is manageable I guess, but the forecasted amount for April is around $450... Come. On. Google, you&#x27;re killing me here.<p>So, I guess what I&#x27;m trying to find out is how much do you guys pay for Google Cloud and how are you keeping your cost under control?
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fullito
We are around 3-7k / month.

We do: \- big nodes -> less k8s overhead [https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-
engine/docs/concepts/clu...](https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-
engine/docs/concepts/cluster-architecture#memory_cpu) \-
[https://github.com/kubecost](https://github.com/kubecost) -> grafana shows us
what we spend \- autoscaling -> default nodepool for stuff which has to run \-
keeping logs and especially metrics on gcloud low. Metrics are really
expensive

Thats what we do professionally. For my startup, i use digital ocean as it is
just so much cheaper and my trusty homeserver (core i7, 32gig ram, 4 hdds with
zfs, 1tb nvm ssd) runs argocd + gitlab builds.

This way i have the much cheaper server at home for all load related things
and as my server was build as low power machine, it only consumes 50watt if it
is not doing anything.

With this setup i predict something like 100-250,- Euro per month
infrastructure costs.

Of course buying that server would cost something like 500-700,- Euros but i
had it running already and i'm using it for tons of other things. And the
hardware inside is already 3 years old (core i7 2700k) but still much cheaper
then using GKE nodes.

If i would not have the option to have a homeserver, i would probably
configure my GKE cluster to connect with a very lightweight service mesh an
additonal node from some other server provider like hetzner.de. They offer
very current core i7 with 32gig/64gig for 50,- Euros per month.

It clearly depends what you have more: Money or Time. I personally have more
time on my hand then Money so i don't mind really having a slightly more
complex and more self managed setup. I also did not spend more then 1-2
weekends on getting it running. Nonetheless if you can bill your hours, thats
probably not worth it.

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andreigaspar
Great insights, thanks for sharing. Recently I found myself plotting how much
extra time I spend on maintaining and configuring, which is basically the
money vs time problem. No conclusion reached yet on my side.

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asheikh
I pay ~$300 a month for a small application. gcp & K8s is great services but
it is not good for your bottom line or startups.

Kurian is focusing on enterprise customers

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andreigaspar
Yeh I agree.

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verdverm
You need to look at the billing tab to see what's costing you.

I recently reduced a company's spend by 60%

\- increase VM size in k8s, force cluster pool size down \- turn off
stackdriver logs (want to run EFK here instead)

Why do you need a cluster per project? The point of k8s is to run lots of
applications in the same cluster to reduce costs.

FYI, your k8s clusters will start costing ~$72 / month in June (iirc)

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fullito
As far as i know, k8s stackdriver logs are included.

We create a few hundred gb k8s logs per month and we also run
grafana/prometheus but i would highly doubt that running
grafana/prometheus/loki etc. yourself is cheaper then using stackdriver.

~~~
verdverm
It is, we have proof by billing statements

1TB of logs is $500

