Stopping a Google Cloud VM doesn’t stop the bill

Stopping a VM in Google Cloud works a lot like stopping one on AWS. The server shuts down, the compute charge stops, and several other lines on the bill carry on as if nothing happened. Here is what Google still charges for, at us-central1 list prices, and when to delete instead.

01What does Google stop charging for when you stop a VM?

vCPUs and memory. Once the stop completes, the VM moves to the TERMINATED state. Despite the name, nothing is deleted: Google’s word for a stopped VM is TERMINATED, and you can start it again. Google bills CPU only while a VM is RUNNING (or shutting down gracefully), so for an e2-standard-2 that is the $48.92 a month it costs to run, gone.

02What keeps billing on a stopped Compute Engine VM?

Google’s docs are blunt about it: you pay for attached resources like disks and external IP addresses regardless of the VM’s state. Here is a stopped e2-standard-2 with a 100 GiB pd-balanced boot disk and a static external IP, at us-central1 list prices:

Persistent disks bill for every GiB you provisioned, not what is written on them. The same 100 GiB costs $4.00 a month as pd-standard ($0.04 per GiB-month) and $17.00 as pd-ssd ($0.17). Every extra data disk on the VM adds its own line. Ten forgotten VMs like this one come to $136.50 a month.

03Does the static IP keep billing?

Yes, and it is the part people get wrong. Google counts a static external IP as in use while it is assigned to a VM, whether the VM is running or stopped, and bills it at the in-use rate: $0.005 an hour, $3.65 a month. An ephemeral IP is different: Google releases it when the VM stops, and you get a new one on start.

The trap comes when you clean up. Delete the VM but keep its static address, and the address becomes RESERVED, unattached to anything. Google bills that at the higher rate: $0.01 an hour, $7.30 a month.

04Do snapshots keep costing money?

Yes, for as long as they exist, including after the VM and its disks are gone. A standard snapshot bills for the compressed data on the disk, not its provisioned size. Unless you change the default, a snapshot of a us-central1 disk is stored in the us multi-region at $0.065 per GiB-month; stored in us-central1 itself it is $0.05. The AWS version of this story is in what a stopped EC2 instance still costs.

05Should you stop, suspend or delete the VM?

• Back tomorrow? Stop it. Overnight you only pay for the disks and the static IP.
• Back in a few days, and want it exactly as it was? Suspend it. Google saves the memory and bills it at $0.000232876 per GiB-hour in us-central1, about $1.36 a month for an e2-standard-2’s 8 GB, on top of the disks and IP. A VM can stay suspended for up to 60 days, and VMs with GPUs or more than 208 GB of memory can’t be suspended.
• Not needed for weeks? Take a snapshot of the disk, or a machine image of the whole VM ($0.05 per GiB-month), then delete the VM. Check that its disks went with it, and release the static IP so it doesn’t start billing $7.30 a month on its own.

06How do you find them in your project?

In the console: Compute Engine → VM instances, look at the status column for stopped VMs; Compute Engine → Disks, look for disks with nothing in In use by; VPC network → IP addresses, look for external addresses that are reserved. Or with the gcloud CLI:

# Stopped VMs, and when they were stopped
gcloud compute instances list --filter="status=TERMINATED" \
  --format="table(name,zone.basename(),machineType.basename(),lastStopTimestamp)"

# Disks attached to nothing
gcloud compute disks list --filter="-users:*" \
  --format="table(name,zone.basename(),sizeGb,type.basename())"

# Static IPs: RESERVED is attached to nothing; IN_USE shows which VM holds it
gcloud compute addresses list --format="table(name,address,status,users)"

Each command covers the whole project, every region and zone. Disks attached to a stopped VM won’t show in the second list: they still count as attached. For the other things Google Cloud bills while idle, from stopped Cloud SQL to empty GKE clusters, see five Google Cloud resources that bill you while doing nothing.