Google Cloud cost audit
Pay for what you use, not for what sits idle.
For a US analytics SaaS client we took the monthly Google Cloud bill from $14,881 to $3,660 in one month, and later from $8,652 to $5,016. Same product, same users. We find where the money goes, SKU by SKU, and remove the waste without slowing anything down.
Results
−75%
$14,881 → $3,660 a month
US analytics SaaS on BigQuery, June to July 2025.
−42%
$8,652 → $5,016 a month
Same client, a second round as the product grew, September to October 2026.
$3.64
of real traffic in an $1,800 year
Our own product, BusTrans: the rest was idle capacity. How we found it.
Monthly totals from the Google Cloud billing console. Client name withheld.
Where the money usually goes
01
Warm instances
Cloud Run minimum instances set in the console that override your deploy file, and keep several containers running all night.
02
Leftovers
VMs, load balancers, disks and Redis instances from an old setup that nothing calls anymore.
03
BigQuery scans
Tables partitioned by ingestion time, dashboards that scan everything on every refresh, missing clustering.
04
Storage creep
Years of Docker images in Artifact Registry and objects in Cloud Storage with no lifecycle rules.
05
Staging that never sleeps
Test environments deployed with default settings and no instance cap.
06
Logs and egress
Verbose logging and cross-region traffic nobody looked at.
What you get
- Billing broken down by SKU. Not by project: by the actual line items, so every dollar has a name.
- A ranked list of fixes. Monthly saving, risk and speed impact for each one.
- The fixes, if you want them. As pull requests to your deploy config, so the next deploy doesn't undo them.
- A check two weeks later. We compare the new bill to the old one and confirm the saving is real.
Questions
Do you need access to our Google Cloud project?
Read-only billing and project viewer access is enough for the audit. Nothing changes until you approve it.
Will cutting costs make the app slower?
It shouldn't. Most waste is capacity nobody uses: idle instances, forgotten VMs, old images. We tell you the speed trade-off of every change before you make it.
What if there's nothing to save?
Then you get a written confirmation that your setup is sound, and we say so on the call before you pay for a full audit.
Send us your last Google Cloud invoice.
On the first call we look at it together and tell you whether an audit is worth it. Fixed price if it is.
