Cloud Workstations pricing

This document explains Cloud Workstations pricing details. If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Pricing overview

When you use Cloud Workstations, you pay for:

  • Compute Engine and Persistent Disk resources, using the same rate you currently pay for Compute Engine.

    • Compute Engine offers Committed Use Discounts (CUD) for one year or three year commitments.
    • Compute Engine also offers Sustained Use Discount (SUD) for certain VM types such as N1 or N2, which are applied when they’re used for 25%+ of the hours in a month. For more information, see Sustained use discounts.
    • If you also attach one or more GPUs to your workstations, each GPU adds to the cost of your workstations in addition to the costs above, according to the pricing listed here.

  • A workstation management fee of ($0.05 * number of vCPUs) / hour (details).

  • A control plane fee of $0.20 / hour (details). For the majority of cases, you need only a single control plane.

Workstation resource and management

Cloud Workstations are powered by Virtual Machines and have Persistent Disks attached to them. In addition, a management fee is added for each active workstation. Workstations accrue a management fee of $0.05 per virtual CPU, per hour. Metering of the management fee begins when you start a workstation, and continues until the workstation is stopped.

To manage costs, you can set-up an inactivity time limit that automatically stops workstations after they have been inactive for the specified time period.

Control plane

The workstation cluster (or control plane) manages your workstations throughout their lifecycle and provides network connectivity capabilities.

For the majority of cases, you need only a single control plane. Multiple control planes are only required for creating workstations across different regions or to connect to different VPCs.

Workstation clusters accrue a control plane fee of $0.20 per cluster, per hour, regardless of whether the cluster's workstations are in use.

Pricing table for compute and management cost

These are the total workstation compute and management hourly prices for the machine types supported. If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Control plane and Persistent Disk costs are applied separately.

The prices in the following table apply to the us-central1 region; pricing for your region may vary.

 

Pricing example: One developer

Assume that one developer in the us-central1 region uses 8 hours five days a week +1 hour before auto-shut down for inactivity. The developer uses a e2-standard-4 workstation with 4 vCPU and 16 GB RAM, with a 100 GB of balanced provisioned space Persistent Disk.

In this example, 9 hours of workstation usage per workday multiplied by 22 workdays in an average month, equals 198 hours per month:

  • 198 workstation hours per month at $0.32 per hour = $63.36 per month for workstation management fee
  • In addition, add the price of Persistent Disk resources: 100GB * $0.1 per GB = $10.00 per month

Compute the subtotal as follows: $63.36 + $10 = $73.36 per month for one developer.

In addition, the cluster fee for its control plane would be as follows for a 30-day month:

  • $0.20 per hour * 24 hours * 30 days = $144.00 per month per workstations cluster

The total monthly bill for this developer would be $73.36 + $144.00 = $217.36 per month.

Pricing example: 100 developers

Assume that the workstation cluster in the example above is used by 100 developers in the us-central1 region, who use the same developer workstation configuration. The calculation would be as follows:

  • The total monthly workstation usage bill for these 100 developers would be $73.36 x 100 = $7,336 per month for 100 developers.
  • For a 30-day month, the cluster fee for one shared workstation cluster would be $144.00.

The total workstation usage cost plus workstation cluster fee would be ($7,336 + $144.00) = $7,480 per month.

The average monthly cost for 100 developers using the same workstation configuration would be ($7,480 ÷ 100) = $74.80 per developer.

What's next

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