Google Cloud pricing changes and billing changes since 2026-01-01, as a dated log: one row per change to a price list, a commitment programme, an export format or a billing mechanism, with who it affects and the Google source behind it. A feature without an effect on the bill is not a row. The log starts on 2026-01-01, is extended by the handbook's monthly rescan, and never loses a row: a correction is a new row with its own date. A change that takes effect in the future sits at the top, under the date on which it applies.
Changes
| Date | What changed | Who is affected | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2027-01-01 | Gemini 3.8 Flash, 3.7 Flash and 3.6 Flash leave their introductory price: USD 0.75 per million input and USD 3.75 per million output tokens until 2026-12-31, then USD 1.50 and 7.50 (Global) | Users of the Gemini Flash models on the Agent Platform | Agent Platform pricing |
| 2026-12-01 | Gemini 4 Argon doubles on the Standard tier when the 50 percent credit ends on 2026-11-30: from USD 2 to 4 per million input and from USD 10 to 20 per million output tokens (Global) | Users of Gemini 4 Argon | Agent Platform pricing |
| 2026-10-21 | The pricing data export to BigQuery carries SKU attributes and finer usage units such as tokens (Preview) | Teams joining the pricing export to usage | Cloud Billing release notes |
| 2026-10-13 | Spend cap budgets are generally available for eligible services: usage is paused once the estimated spend exceeds the budget; Preview since 2026-07-27 | Projects that need a hard cap | Cloud Billing release notes |
| 2026-10-13 | Spend-based committed use discounts move to a consumption model that puts the discount into the price instead of crediting it: new fee SKUs, offer and consumption model IDs, new price and cost fields and two rows per commitment in the billing export; the migration date is shown per billing account on the Billing Overview page (documentation date) | Everyone with spend-based CUDs (Compute Flexible, Cloud SQL, GKE, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Spanner and others) | Spend-based CUDs data model updates |
| 2026-08-26 | Flexible Savings Plans: a monthly spend commitment on Gemini, open-source and partner models for one or three years, 10 to 20 percent off; unused monthly commitment is forfeited and overage is billed at list rates | AI workloads with a steady token spend | Flexible billing and cost controls for agents |
| 2026-07-10 | Invoiced billing accounts get a Payment status page for their payment documents instead of the Invoices page; self-service accounts keep the Invoices page | Invoiced accounts | Cloud Billing release notes |
| 2026-06-08 | The billing data export to BigQuery is available in FOCUS format (Preview), with columns up to FOCUS 1.2 | Teams reporting in FOCUS | Cloud Billing release notes |
| 2026-05-01 | Data transfer out through CDN Interconnect, Direct Peering and Carrier Peering: North America from USD 0.04 to 0.08 per GiB, Europe from 0.05 to 0.08, Asia from 0.06 to 0.085; six SKUs; fixed-price contracts stay unchanged until renewal | Peering and CDN Interconnect users | CDN Interconnect and peering pricing update |
| 2026-03-24 | The Terms of Service allow paid credits (Section 2.1, Billing), and the Pricing and Billing Terms gain Section 4 on paid credits | Customers buying credits under contract | Legal change log |
| 2026-03-02 | Backup for GKE: the management fee moves from USD 1.00 per pod-month to USD 9.00 per namespace-month and backup storage from USD 0.028 to 0.045 per GiB-month (us-central1); customers with a CUD keep the pod-based fee until the commitment ends | GKE clusters with Backup for GKE | Backup for GKE pricing change |
| 2026-02-01 | Cloud Storage multi-region data transfer fees apply to BigQuery jobs that read a multi-region bucket from another location, on three network data transfer SKUs; previous bills stay unchanged | BigQuery loads from multi-region buckets | BigQuery billing change |
How to read your bill after a change
A price-list change (peering, Backup for GKE, the multi-region fee, a Gemini model price) keeps the SKU and changes the rate: in the billing export to BigQuery the list price sits in price.list_price and the charged one in price.effective_price, the SKU in sku.description and its ID in sku.id. A new fee such as the multi-region transfer for BigQuery appears as a new SKU under service.description Cloud Storage, not under BigQuery; the way to it is the three SKU names. For Backup for GKE the unit in the SKU name moves from pod to namespace, and customers with a commitment see both models side by side until the commitment ends. A future effective date (Gemini 4 Argon, the Flash models) is checked by comparing the token SKUs in the first month after it. The export's structure is in the Google Cloud billing export, its mapping in FOCUS columns, and the model prices in AI model pricing and rate cards.
A commitment programme change (the CUD migration, Flexible Savings Plans) changes the rows, not the usage. Before the migration, discounted usage carried a credit of type COMMITTED_USAGE_DISCOUNT_DOLLAR_BASE in credits; after it the discount sits in the price, the consumption_model field names the model, the fee row carries a FEE_UTILIZATION_OFFSET credit, and each commitment produces two rows. Queries that filter on the old offer or fee SKU IDs return nothing once the billing account has migrated; the mapping table is in the documentation. A Flexible Savings Plan has a monthly window: utilisation is read at month end, an hour without usage costs nothing extra, a month below the commitment does. The basics are in Google Cloud committed use discounts and commitment coverage and utilisation.
A billing mechanism change (spend cap budgets, paid credits, the Payment status page) changes what an account can do, not the price. A spend cap budget pauses usage when the estimate exceeds the budget; the estimate runs ahead of billing, and the stop shows in the export as usage that ends. Paid credits appear like other credits in credits, with their own type. How budgets and thresholds are set is in budget alerts and thresholds.
Two older changes still meet readers in the bill although they predate 2026-01-01: BigQuery has not offered the flat-rate model since 2023-07-05, and capacity has been billed as editions slot hours since, and Cloud Storage keeps deleted objects for seven days by default as soft delete, which keeps accruing storage charges. Both are explained in data warehouses and analytics and storage tiers and lifecycle.
Sources
Read on 2026-10-21. Cloud Billing release notes, Google Cloud pricing, BigQuery pricing, Cloud Storage soft delete, Flexible Savings Plans, Migrated CUD SKUs, offers and consumption models; each row links its source.