Cloud Armor Calculator

standard = policies × policy price + rules × rule price + millions of requests × request price; Plus = subscription + resources above the allowance × per-resource price + processed GiB × data price. Standard Cloud Armor bills three things: each policy, each rule inside it, and every million requests evaluated. Managed Protection Plus replaces the policy and request meters with a flat subscription plus a per-GiB data charge, so the crossover depends almost entirely on request volume rather than on rule count.

Rule count is cheap and request volume is not, so a WAF that inspects a busy public endpoint can cost more than the service behind it — and Plus also buys DDoS bill protection, which is a financial control rather than a technical one. Confirm subscription terms and per-request pricing in the Google Cloud pricing calculator, since the subscription has a minimum commitment.

This calculator takes 13 inputs: Security policies, Price per policy, Rules across all policies, Price per rule, Requests inspected, Price per million requests, Service tier, Managed Protection Plus subscription, Protected resources, Resources included in the subscription, Price per resource above the allowance, Data processed by Managed Protection, Managed Protection data price per GiB. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.

Yes. The request meter counts requests evaluated against a policy, whether the verdict is allow, deny or rate-limit. That is the point of the rate-limiting rules — blocking cheaply at the edge is still cheaper than passing the traffic to your backends.