On-Demand (per-second billing)
Pay-as-you-go Compute Engine pricing, billed per second after a one-minute minimum — the baseline every discount is measured against.
GCP charges Compute Engine VMs per second (with a one-minute minimum) at published on-demand rates, with no commitment. Unlike AWS and Azure, the price is not quoted per machine: GCP bills each vCPU-hour and each GB-hour of memory separately.
So the price of a predefined machine like n2-standard-8 is a derived number — its vCPU count times the per-vCPU rate plus its memory times the per-GB rate. This explorer composes those prices for you and expresses every discount as a percentage off on-demand.
More GCP pricing terms
Per-vCPU / per-GB billingSustained Use Discount (SUD)Committed Use Discount (CUD)Spot VMs (Preemptible)Custom machine typesExtended memoryMachine series (E2, N-series, C-series, M-series)Axion & Arm (C4A)Sole-tenant nodesEffective price at 100% monthly useNormalized pricing ($/vCPU, $/GB)Max saving %Best price region
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