Google Cloud Platform has probably the best price planning tool available compared to any other cloud provider and I'm not being paid to say that. The reason we're doing a separate lesson on pricing is largely because their price calculator is really good. It's very flexible and it's a very good place to start when planning a GCP project.

So the first thing you'll notice about the calculator web app is that it breaks out everything by product. You can select everything from Compute Engine to App Engine, storage products like Datastore, everything in between, just about every single GCP product is selectable and for each one you can completely describe what sort of component you want to add to your system.

So, for example, we can go to the Compute Engine tab, we can go in there, we can select an instance type, region, instance count, time commitment, several other options, and then after that, once we have a thorough detailed view of our compute architecture, we click Add to estimate and we immediately get a monthly cost.

Now, the cool thing is you can do this for several services or multiple times for a single product. So you can actually name each component which is kind of cool. So you can have a breakdown with something like dev environment storage and production environment storage, where you have multiple instances of storage products or the same storage product. I'm gonna add like test environment GKE, and see each component broken down by price in the tool with a grand total at the bottom.

Now, estimates, once they're generated, you can save them by clicking save estimate, and this will generate a link that you can share with people you know your team or whoever you need to. There's also an email estimate button that you will, that, you know, as you guessed it, it'll email it to an address of your choice. These are two nice little quality of life features that help you share and preserve estimates. It's particularly nice if you have a really complex architecture that you're proposing and you need to share with a lot of different people a lot of specifically configured products.

One other handy thing about this GCP pricing tool is that Google Cloud actually exposes an API for querying pricing data and on top of that, there's actually a simplified web page as well if you just want to see a text list of prices. So for the API this is really good for tooling. For example, if you want to create a script that generates reports or tracks prices, you can use the API along with the Google Cloud CLI tools and there or the libraries and it'll just you can it'll do that for you.

The GCP SKU web page, by contrast, is really just a simple search page with a list of prices by service. So this is helpful if you just want to get a general sense or show it to someone, basic prices by service. So in the demo video, we're gonna go a little bit over the pricing calculator. It's fairly intuitive but we'll show you how to run through a couple of simple scenarios, generate a few different estimates for different use cases. And that's basically it.

Now you have some knowledge about pricing tools, we're ready to go into our practical demo. It'll be a lot of fun, we'll see you there.