Cloud Billing in Google Cloud Platform is mainly used to track, manage, and pay for your cloud usage costs. It links projects to a billing account, calculates charges from resource usage, and helps you monitor spending, budgets, and invoices.

What it does

  • Tracks the costs and savings from Google Cloud usage across linked projects.
  • Defines who pays for those resources through a billing account.
  • Routes charges to a linked payments account so the bill can be paid.
  • Supports cost control with reports, budgets, and billing permissions.

Simple example

If a team runs virtual machines, storage, and networking in several projects, Cloud Billing collects those usage costs under the right billing account and shows the total in one place.

In one line

The primary function of Cloud Billing is to measure cloud usage costs and manage payment for them.