Explanation
Why the waste happens and who it affects.
Premium Tier, the default for every project and resource, carries traffic over Google's own network to reach users. Standard Tier hands traffic to peering, ISP or transit networks and is priced lower per GiB of internet egress. Unless someone sets the tier explicitly, every VM external IP, regional load balancer and Cloud NAT gateway sends its internet traffic at Premium rates.
For many egress-heavy workloads that price buys little: software and dataset downloads, backups or exports pushed to other clouds, webhooks, regional APIs whose users sit near the region, and batch jobs pulling or pushing data. Google's documentation describes Standard Tier as a lower-cost alternative for applications that are not latency or performance sensitive and that are deployed in a single region, while still recommending Premium as the general default. Because the tier is chosen per resource at creation and falls back to Premium, egress from these workloads keeps being billed at Premium rates unless someone deliberately changes it.
Billing model
The pricing dimensions that drive this cost.
Internet egress is billed per GiB, and the rate depends on the tier of the resource sending the traffic.
- Premium Tier egress
- Billed at internet data transfer rates by destination; for example, from us-central1 to North America $0.12 per GiB for the first TiB after the first free GiB, falling to $0.08 above 10 TiB
- Standard Tier egress
- Billed per GiB delivered based on the source region; in us-central1 the first 200 GiB per month are free, then $0.085, $0.065 and $0.045 per GiB by volume band
- Default tier
- Premium unless a different default is set for the project or a tier is set on the individual resource
- Unchanged resource prices
- The tier does not affect the price of IP addresses, instances or forwarding rules, only data transfer
How to detect
4 checks to find it in your estate.
- Check each project's default network tier (defaultNetworkTier in project info); projects still on PREMIUM create every new external resource at Premium
- List VM access configs, external IP addresses and forwarding rules with networkTier PREMIUM that serve regional traffic
- In the Cloud Billing report or billing export, group Networking SKUs by description to find the largest sources of Premium internet data transfer out, and attribute them to projects and resources
- For each high-egress resource, confirm whether it depends on Premium-only features such as global external load balancers, Cloud CDN or Cloud VPN, and whether its users or destinations are near the source region
How to fix
5 ways to remove the waste.
- Set new regional external IPs, regional external load balancers and Cloud NAT gateways that carry latency-insensitive traffic to Standard Tier with --network-tier STANDARD
- Change the project default with gcloud compute project-info update --default-network-tier STANDARD for projects where global features are not needed; this affects only new resources, not existing ones
- Plan for address changes when moving existing resources: IP addresses cannot move between tier pools, so a static IP must be replaced by a new Standard Tier reservation, and changing the tier of a VM with an ephemeral IP changes its address
- Keep Premium Tier for global external load balancers, Cloud CDN, Cloud VPN, regional external IPv6 addresses and user-facing traffic where latency and path quality across regions matter; Standard Tier also carries a 99.9 percent uptime SLA versus 99.99 percent for Premium
- Account for free tier differences: Always Free internet egress limits apply to Premium Tier but not to Standard Tier, which has its own monthly free allowance per region
Documentation
Vendor references for pricing and configuration.