Sustained use discounts already take 20% off the always-on part of your bill, automatically, with nothing signed. That is the baseline a commitment has to beat — not list price.
Google Cloud · Committed use discounts
A committed use discount is a three-year invoice you sign in an afternoon. If your usage falls, you pay the full term anyway. Put your numbers in and see both sides before you buy.
You can't cancel the commitments you've purchased.Google Cloud documentation — Spend-based committed use discounts
The calculator
Four inputs. Nothing is sent anywhere, and nothing connects to your account.
Pre-filled with an example workload. Replace it with yours.
Sustained use discounts already take 20% off the always-on part of your bill, automatically, with nothing signed. That is the baseline a commitment has to beat — not list price.
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Each row assumes you cover your whole always-on portion — the obvious move, and the one that creates the exposure in the last column.
| Commitment | Sticker rate | Real cut of your bill | vs. doing nothing | Saved over the term | If usage drops 20% |
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Memory-optimized 1-year resource rates vary by SKU; 37% used as an approximation.
How the discounts actually work
Leave a VM running and Google discounts it automatically — up to 30% on N1, up to 20% on N2, N2D and C2. You did not ask for it and you cannot lose it.
Commitments replace that discount, they do not stack on it. So a 55% commitment on a machine already getting 20% off is worth 44% of what you actually pay, not 55%. And a 28% one-year flexible commitment on an N1 getting 30% off is worth less than nothing.
Resource-based commitments buy a specific machine shape in a specific region and pay the most. Flexible commitments buy dollars per hour across Compute Engine, GKE and Cloud Run, follow you as workloads move, and pay less for that freedom.
On 21 January 2026 Google moved spend-based commitments to a new billing model. Usage now bills at a discounted rate on the SKU instead of at list price with a credit applied afterwards.
Your cost did not change. Your reports did: the credit line item that used to prove the discount is gone. Anything built on the old billing-export schema now reads as though the discount vanished.
A commitment is debt. Three years of it, at a fixed monthly amount, whether or not the workload still exists — after a migration, a customer churning, a rewrite that halves your footprint.
The honest coverage target is your floor, not your average. Buy under it and the downside column stays at zero. The difference between those two numbers is what this page exists to show.
The review
The calculator works on four numbers you typed. Your billing export has millions of rows, and that is where the real answer is.
A viewer role on your billing export in BigQuery, and nothing else. Ten minutes, revocable from your own console at any time.
Coverage, utilisation and real savings on every commitment you already hold, plus the spend still sitting at on-demand rates.
What to buy, which instrument, which term, and what it exposes you to if usage falls. Every figure traces back to the billing lines behind it.
We never buy a commitment for you, and we never will. The purchase stays in your console, under your name.
Most of a security review is spent establishing what a vendor cannot do. Here it is up front.
Read-only, on the billing data only. We cannot start, stop, resize or delete anything in your account, because we were never granted the permission to.
Access is delegated through your own IAM. Nothing downloadable ever leaves your organisation, so there is no key to leak, rotate or forget.
We query your billing export where it lives, in your BigQuery. We do not copy it into ours. Revoke the role and the access ends the same minute.
A commitment is a three-year financial obligation. A tool should never sign one on your behalf, and this one is built so it cannot.
Tell us where to reach you and roughly what you spend. We will come back with what your export shows — what is uncovered, what to buy, and what it would expose you to.
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