Google Cloud Tiered Billing - Project v Billing Account

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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.

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google-cloud-platformgoogle-natural-languagegoogle-cloud-billing
I am posting a comment because I am not 1000% sure and I have not looked up links to justify an answer. 1) Billing accounts are not related to discounts, free tier, etc. They are used for payment only. 2) If you do not have an organization then the projects are separate and have no relationship to each other for billing/usage/discount purposes. 3) If these projects are part of an organization, then I "believe" that the sum of the usage of each project is used for pricing/usage/discounts. – John Hanley
I am finding conflicting information. Some services are per project (Compute Engine sustained discounts). I recommend that you contact Google Cloud Billing directly and ask. Post the answer once you have written confirmation. cloud.google.com/support/billing – John Hanley

3 Answers

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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.

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Most of time, without specific mention, the pricing is per project (I asked my Custom Engineer, 1 year ago, about this). It's not very clear in this pricing page except this line:

For more than 20 million units per month for a customer project (for Content Classification, this threshold is 5 million units per month)

The 20M specified in the pricing grid is per customer project. Contact your sale or your Custom Engineer for discussing about special pricing/discount.

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The billing charges and discounts are calculated on a per project basis. In this particular case, splitting workload among various projects could indeed lead to higher costs.