Google has found its way into nearly everyone's pocket, quite literally. Chances are you checked Gmail, opened Google Maps, or used a Google service at some point today.
For many startups and enterprises, that reach extends to their infrastructure. Google Cloud powers applications, data platforms, Kubernetes clusters, and some of the most demanding AI workloads in production.
Alongside the million other things we are shipping this week, we are proud to launch our Google Cloud integration.
CostGraph can now ingest Google Cloud billing data, normalize it alongside your other infrastructure costs, and give engineering and finance teams a clearer view of what they are spending and what is driving that spend.
Normalized and reconciled Google Cloud costs
CostGraph reads Google Cloud spend from the FOCUS and Detailed usage cost exports in BigQuery.
The FOCUS export gives us a standardized, cross-provider view of your costs. The Detailed export adds resource-level information and allows CostGraph to validate the FOCUS data against your Google Cloud invoice.
Together, these exports allow CostGraph to preserve:
- Billed and effective costs
- Credits and commitment attribution
- Billing accounts
- Projects
- Services
- Resources
- Labels
- Shared and unallocated costs
Google Cloud spend is normalized into the same cost model as AWS, PlanetScale, Kubernetes, and other supported providers.
Allocation without hiding the difficult costs
CostGraph attributes Google Cloud spend by resource, label, project, and billing account when that information is available. Tax, shared charges, and commitment costs that cannot be assigned directly remain visible in an explicit unallocated bucket.
Allocated and unallocated costs are then reconciled against the invoice for each billing account and month.
Recommendations across clouds
CostGraph combines Google Cloud pricing with resource and usage data to identify idle infrastructure, rightsizing opportunities, and safer alternatives.
As with other integrations, CostGraph can compare a Google Cloud VM with equivalent options from other supported cloud providers.
Cross-cloud recommendations are only shown when they are at least approximately 30% cheaper and meet our capacity, architecture, latency, and region-proximity requirements.
Each recommendation includes estimated monthly cost, potential savings, confidence, and the considerations your team should review before making a change.
Keyless access by default
CostGraph only needs read access to the BigQuery datasets containing your billing exports.
Our recommended setup uses Google Cloud Workload Identity Federation. This allows CostGraph to impersonate a read-only service account without downloading or storing a service account key.
A scoped service account key remains available as a fallback.
Google Cloud support is now available in CostGraph. If this sounds useful, get started for free or book a demo today.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is being launched?
CostGraph is launching support for Google Cloud cost ingestion, allocation, reconciliation, and cross-provider recommendations.
Customers can connect a Google Cloud billing account and view its costs alongside AWS, Kubernetes, PlanetScale, and other supported infrastructure providers.
How does the Google Cloud integration work?
CostGraph reads billing data from Google Cloud's FOCUS and Detailed usage cost exports in BigQuery.
The exported data is normalized into the same canonical cost model used for other infrastructure providers.
Which Google Cloud billing exports are required?
CostGraph requires:
- The FOCUS billing export
- The Detailed usage cost export
The Standard usage cost export is not required because the Detailed export already contains its information.
The Pricing export is not required for cost ingestion.
Why does CostGraph require both FOCUS and Detailed exports?
The FOCUS export provides normalized cost and usage data that can be compared with other providers.
The Detailed export adds resource-level rows and allows CostGraph to reconcile the FOCUS data against your Google Cloud invoice.
Using both gives teams standardized costs without losing the detail required for attribution and reconciliation.
How do I enable the exports?
In the Google Cloud Console, open your billing account and go to Billing export > BigQuery export.
Enable the FOCUS export and the Detailed usage cost export, then select the project and data location where Google Cloud should create the datasets.
Google does not currently provide an API, gcloud command, or Terraform resource for enabling the billing export. This is the only manual step.
What permissions does CostGraph require?
The read-only service account requires:
- roles/bigquery.jobUser on the export project
- roles/bigquery.dataViewer on the FOCUS dataset
- roles/bigquery.dataViewer on the Detailed dataset
Dataset-level access is recommended so CostGraph can only read the billing data it needs.
Does CostGraph require a Google Cloud service account key?
No. Workload Identity Federation is the recommended connection method.
You grant CostGraph's federated identity roles/iam.workloadIdentityUser on the read-only service account. CostGraph can then query the billing datasets without downloading or storing a service account key.
A scoped service account key is supported as a fallback.
Does CostGraph use Google OAuth?
No. CostGraph does not use "Sign in with Google" for billing access.
OAuth would tie the integration to an individual user and grant broader scopes than necessary. A read-only service account with Workload Identity Federation provides a narrower and more durable trust model.
What Google Cloud cost data is available?
CostGraph preserves the information available from the Google Cloud billing exports, including:
- Billed cost
- Effective or amortized cost
- Credits
- Commitment attribution
- Billing accounts
- Projects
- Services
- Resources
- Labels
Costs that cannot be attributed directly to a resource remain visible as unallocated costs.
How does CostGraph reconcile Google Cloud costs?
CostGraph checks that allocated and unallocated costs equal the invoice total for each billing account and month.
The FOCUS export is also validated against the Detailed usage cost export to help identify incomplete or inconsistent cost data.
Does CostGraph provide Google Cloud optimization recommendations?
Yes. CostGraph uses pricing and observed resource usage to identify rightsizing and idle-resource opportunities.
Where sufficient data is available, it can also compare Google Cloud VMs with equivalent options from other supported providers.
Recommendations include estimated monthly cost, potential savings, confidence, and relevant migration considerations.
How frequently does Google Cloud cost data refresh?
CostGraph checks the connected BigQuery billing exports for updated data every hour.
Google Cloud controls when new rows are written to BigQuery. Initial rows usually appear within a few hours after the exports are enabled.
How much historical Google Cloud data is available?
For exports created in the US or EU multi-regions, Google Cloud backfills the current month and the previous month. The backfill can take up to five days to complete.
Regional export locations do not backfill previous data. Their billing history begins from the date the export is enabled.
For this reason, we recommend using the US or EU multi-regions when possible.