Price a Google Cloud load balancer from forwarding rules, data processed and egress, and size it against peak traffic.
A Google Cloud load balancer has two very different cost components: a small fixed hourly charge per forwarding rule, and a per-GiB data processing charge that scales with traffic. Internet egress is billed on top and is usually several times the processing rate, which is why the egress share of the bill is called out separately. Teams optimise the hourly rule charge and ignore the per-GiB lines, when for any real traffic volume egress and processing dominate — compressing responses or serving them from cache moves the bill far more than consolidating rules. Confirm processing and egress rates for your region and destination in the Google Cloud pricing calculator.
Cloud Load Balancer
monthly = (base rule charge + extra rules × per-rule charge) × hours + processed GiB × processing price + egress GiB × egress price, where processed GiB = requests × response size.
monthly = (base rule charge + extra rules × per-rule charge) × hours + processed GiB × processing price + egress GiB × egress price, where processed GiB = requests × response size. A Google Cloud load balancer has two very different cost components: a small fixed hourly charge per forwarding rule, and a per-GiB data processing charge that scales with traffic. Internet egress is billed on top and is usually several times the processing rate, which is why the egress share of the bill is called out separately.
Teams optimise the hourly rule charge and ignore the per-GiB lines, when for any real traffic volume egress and processing dominate — compressing responses or serving them from cache moves the bill far more than consolidating rules. Confirm processing and egress rates for your region and destination in the Google Cloud pricing calculator.
This calculator takes 11 inputs: Forwarding rules, Rules covered by the base charge, Base charge for the included rules, Charge per additional rule, Requests per month, Average response size, Data processing price per GiB, Share of responses leaving Google's network, Internet egress price per GiB, Hours in the billing month, Peak requests per second. The pre-filled defaults are a realistic starting point — replace them with figures from your own environment for a result you can act on.
Health checks are not billed separately. Backend services and URL maps are configuration objects rather than billable resources — the meters that matter are forwarding rules, data processed and egress.