google-cloud-platformgoogle-natural-languagegoogle-cloud-billing

Google Cloud Tiered Billing - Project v Billing Account

Question: Within Google Cloud are services that offer tiered volume-based pricing such as "Google Natural Language API" base their Tiers on usage aggregated by PROJECT ID or BILLING ACCOUNT?

Example: Entity Analysis Pricing has its first break after 1 million requests. Is there a difference in total cost if in a given month if an account made 5 million requests to this resource under a single PROJECT ID versus a 5 distinct PROJECT IDS tied to the same BILLING ACCOUNT were to make 1 million requests each - for the same agregate total of 5mm requests?

Google Natural Language Pricing for Entity Analysis Source:https://cloud.google.com/natural-language/pricing

Background: We have a large project that is using multiple Google Cloud Services. These services can be grouped conceptually as: 1. Authentication Services 2. Geolocation Services 3. Natural Language Services

Our project is also deployed in multiple environments (dev/staging/production) and the services that we are using do not yet support Labels.

Ideally, we would like to organize these into 9 distinct GCP projects as it would provide many security and reporting benefits but IF usage for tiered billing is computed at the PROJECT ID level that would result in higher overall costs.

Solution

  • Thank you for responses. I have confirmed that the default configuration is to aggregate billing discounts at the PROJECT level.

    This said I learned that there is a beta program available upon request that allows the aggregation and associated discounts to be calculated at the BILLING ID level. I was able to get into this program through the sales department.