Cost estimate¶

The Cost tab estimates monthly cost from the Cloud Billing Catalog API (on-demand list prices, USD). It is deterministic code, never a model's arithmetic, and every number can be traced to a rate, a quantity and an assumption.

A price book is needed — and it needs your API key

The Cloud Billing Catalog API requires an API key. Enable the Cloud Billing API on a project, create an API key, then run GOOGLE_API_KEY=… npm run prices:fetch. Without a price book the Cost tab is omitted (the CLI prints why) and everything else still works. The pricers match SKUs by service, resource group and description patterns that were written without access to a live catalog: after the first fetch, any pricer whose pattern does not match reports needs-input — never a wrong number. See Data refresh.

What the tab shows¶

Totals per month and per year, how many components were priced, and how many were not.
By category (compute, data and storage, analytics, …) and by component, with every line item expanded as quantity × rate = cost and the SKU id.
Assumptions — every input is tagged from spec (you stated it) or assumed (a default). Any defaulted input makes the estimate indicative.
Sensitivity at 1×, 3× and 10× traffic, and what-ifs (Cloud SQL high-availability cost, Nearline tiering) where they apply.
Provenance: the effective date of each price list and the retrieval date.
A checkbox that overlays $/mo on the diagram.

Giving it real numbers¶

Put a usage object on each node. Anything you leave out falls back to a documented default and is flagged as assumed.

{ "id": "api", "icon": "cloud-run", "label": "Orders API",
  "usage": { "requestsPerMonth": 20000000, "avgDurationMs": 120, "vcpu": 1, "memoryGib": 0.5 } }

Describe the scenario once in meta.cost.note so readers know the basis:

"meta": { "title": "…", "cost": { "region": "us-central1", "note": "Illustrative: 3M searches/month" } }

Usage keys by product¶

Product	Keys (default)
Compute Engine	`machineType` (`e2-standard-4`; predefined `family-standard\\|highmem\\|highcpu-N` or `family-custom-vcpu-memMb`), `count` (2), `bootDiskGb` (50), `hoursPerMonth` (730)
Google Kubernetes Engine	`mode` (`standard`/`autopilot`), `regional` (true), `nodeMachineType` (`e2-standard-4`), `nodeCount` (3); Autopilot pod resources are not modelled
Cloud Run	`requestsPerMonth` (1e6), `avgDurationMs` (200), `vcpu` (1), `memoryGib` (0.5); request-based billing
Cloud Run functions	`invocationsPerMonth` (1e6), `avgDurationMs` (200), `memoryMb` (256), `vcpu` (0.167)
Cloud Storage	`storageClass` (`standard`, `nearline`, `coldline`, `archive`), `location` (`region`, `multi-region`, `dual-region`), `storageGb` (100), `classAOperationsPerMonth` (1e5), `classBOperationsPerMonth` (1e6)
BigQuery	`tibScannedPerMonth` (5), `activeStorageGb` (1000), `longTermStorageGb` (0); on-demand analysis
Pub/Sub	`tibPublishedPerMonth` (0.5)
Cloud SQL	`engine` (`PostgreSQL`, `MySQL`, `SQL Server`), `vcpu` (2), `memoryGb` (8), `highAvailability` (false), `storageGb` (100), `edition`
Cloud Logging / Monitoring / Ops	`ingestGibPerMonth` (50), `retainedGibMonths` (0)

Two keys work on any node:

usage.monthlyUsd — supply the monthly cost yourself (status override). Use it for products without a cost model (Vertex AI model tokens, Spanner, AlloyDB, Memorystore, Apigee…), and say where the number came from in usage.note.
usage.egressGbPerMonth — adds internet network egress (Premium Tier).

Honest statuses¶

Status	Meaning
`estimated`	Priced from the price book with the stated and assumed inputs.
`override`	You supplied `usage.monthlyUsd`.
`no-charge`	The product has no direct charge (VPC networks, IAM, firewall rules…).
`not-billable`	A general icon (users, internet), not a Google Cloud product.
`not-itemized`	The catalog has no separate SKU for it.
`needs-input`	A required input is missing or no unambiguous SKU matched; the reason is shown.
`not-estimated`	No cost model for this product yet. Supply `usage.monthlyUsd` to include it.
`error`	The price book could not resolve an unambiguous rate; the reason is shown.

The total only includes priced components, and the tab says how many were left out.

What is and is not included¶

Included: public on-demand list prices; 730 hours per month; free tiers where the SKU lists them as a zero-price tier. Excluded: taxes, support, committed use discounts (resource-based and flexible), Spot/preemptible, sustained-use discounts where they would apply, negotiated discounts and credits, and network egress unless you set egressGbPerMonth. Treat the result as a planning number and confirm it in the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator.

From the command line¶

archify-gcp cost spec.json                       # table in the terminal
archify-gcp cost spec.json --scale 1,3,10        # sensitivity points
archify-gcp cost spec.json --region us-central1  # needs data/prices/<region>.json
archify-gcp cost spec.json --usage usage.json    # {"<nodeId>": {…usage keys…}} overrides the spec's usage
archify-gcp cost spec.json --json                # full machine-readable result

Turn the tab off with render --no-cost / finalize --no-cost.