Pricing & Price-Performance
Compare on-demand, spot, and committed-use pricing across all VM series. Find the best value for your workload.
Cheapest per vCPU
E2
$0.017/hr per vCPU (on-demand)
Best Spot Discount
~70%
Average spot savings across all series
3yr CUD Savings
~55%
Average committed-use discount vs on-demand
All VM Pricing
Representative machine types for each series. Region: us-central1. Click column headers to sort.
Machine Type | Series | vCPUs | Memory (GB) | On-Demand/hr ↑ | Spot/hr | 1yr CUD/hr | 3yr CUD/hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| e2-standard-4 | E2 | 4 | 16 | $0.134 | $0.040 | $0.084 | $0.060 |
| t2d-standard-4 | T2D | 4 | 16 | $0.154 | $0.046 | $0.097 | $0.069 |
| n2d-standard-4 | N2D | 4 | 16 | $0.169 | $0.051 | $0.106 | $0.076 |
| c3d-standard-4 | C3D | 4 | 16 | $0.192 | $0.058 | $0.121 | $0.086 |
| n2-standard-4 | N2 | 4 | 16 | $0.194 | $0.058 | $0.122 | $0.087 |
| c3-standard-4 | C3 | 4 | 16 | $0.209 | $0.063 | $0.132 | $0.094 |
| e2-standard-8 | E2 | 8 | 32 | $0.268 | $0.080 | $0.168 | $0.120 |
| t2d-standard-8 | T2D | 8 | 32 | $0.308 | $0.092 | $0.194 | $0.139 |
| n2d-standard-8 | N2D | 8 | 32 | $0.338 | $0.101 | $0.213 | $0.152 |
| c3d-standard-8 | C3D | 8 | 32 | $0.384 | $0.115 | $0.242 | $0.173 |
| n2-standard-8 | N2 | 8 | 32 | $0.388 | $0.116 | $0.244 | $0.175 |
| c3-standard-8 | C3 | 8 | 32 | $0.418 | $0.125 | $0.263 | $0.188 |
| e2-standard-16 | E2 | 16 | 64 | $0.536 | $0.161 | $0.337 | $0.241 |
| t2d-standard-16 | T2D | 16 | 64 | $0.616 | $0.185 | $0.388 | $0.277 |
| n2d-standard-16 | N2D | 16 | 64 | $0.676 | $0.203 | $0.426 | $0.304 |
| c3d-standard-16 | C3D | 16 | 64 | $0.768 | $0.230 | $0.484 | $0.346 |
| n2-standard-16 | N2 | 16 | 64 | $0.776 | $0.233 | $0.489 | $0.349 |
| g2-standard-4 | G2 | 4 | 16 | $0.784 | $0.235 | $0.494 | $0.353 |
| g2-standard-8 | G2 | 8 | 32 | $0.918 | $0.275 | $0.578 | $0.413 |
| c3-standard-22 | C3 | 22 | 88 | $1.150 | $0.345 | $0.724 | $0.518 |
| n2-standard-32 | N2 | 32 | 128 | $1.553 | $0.466 | $0.978 | $0.699 |
| g2-standard-24 | G2 | 24 | 96 | $1.853 | $0.556 | $1.167 | $0.834 |
| c3-standard-44 | C3 | 44 | 176 | $2.300 | $0.690 | $1.449 | $1.035 |
| c3d-standard-60 | C3D | 60 | 240 | $2.880 | $0.864 | $1.814 | $1.296 |
| h3-standard-88 | H3 | 88 | 352 | $3.726 | $1.118 | $2.347 | $1.676 |
| z3-standard-88 | Z3 | 88 | 704 | $4.854 | $1.456 | $3.058 | $2.184 |
| m3-ultramem-32 | M3 | 32 | 960 | $5.851 | $1.755 | $3.686 | $2.633 |
| z3-standard-176 | Z3 | 176 | 1408 | $9.709 | $2.913 | $6.117 | $4.369 |
| g2-standard-96 | G2 | 96 | 384 | $10.416 | $3.125 | $6.562 | $4.687 |
| m3-ultramem-64 | M3 | 64 | 1920 | $11.702 | $3.511 | $7.372 | $5.266 |
| m3-ultramem-128 | M3 | 128 | 3904 | $23.790 | $7.137 | $14.988 | $10.706 |
| a3-highgpu-8g | A3 | 208 | 1872 | $29.387 | $8.816 | $18.514 | $13.224 |
Price-Performance Rankings
Performance per dollar spent (higher = better value). Calculated as benchmark result divided by on-demand hourly cost.
Geekbench 6 Single-Core
Nginx Requests/sec
PostgreSQL TPS
FFmpeg H.265 Encoding
Llama 2 7B Tokens/sec
Spot vs On-Demand vs Committed
Spot instances offer the biggest savings (60-70%) but can be preempted. Committed-use discounts (CUDs) provide predictable savings for steady-state workloads.
On-Demand
Pay-as-you-go with no commitment. Best for variable workloads, development, and testing. Most expensive per hour but maximum flexibility.
Spot
60-70% discount but instances can be preempted with 30-second notice. Best for fault-tolerant batch processing, CI/CD, and ML training with checkpointing.
Committed Use (CUD)
1-year (37% off) or 3-year (55% off) commitments. Best for predictable production workloads. Applies automatically to matching usage.