Price Pub/Sub throughput per TiB including the 1,000-byte minimum message size and per-subscription delivery.
Pub/Sub prices message throughput by volume, not by message count, but a 1,000-byte minimum per message means a firehose of 100-byte events bills at ten times its real size. Fan-out matters just as much: every subscription attached to a topic re-bills the same bytes on delivery. Teams size Pub/Sub on message counts and are then surprised by the bill, when the two real drivers are the size floor on small events and the number of subscriptions on a busy topic. Confirm the current per-TiB throughput and retention prices in the Google Cloud pricing calculator for your region.
Pub/Sub Cost
billed bytes = messages × max(payload, 1,000-byte floor) × (1 publish + 1 per subscription); cost = (bytes ÷ 1 TiB − free allotment) × per-TiB price + retained GiB × retention price + egress.
billed bytes = messages × max(payload, 1,000-byte floor) × (1 publish + 1 per subscription); cost = (bytes ÷ 1 TiB − free allotment) × per-TiB price + retained GiB × retention price + egress. Pub/Sub prices message throughput by volume, not by message count, but a 1,000-byte minimum per message means a firehose of 100-byte events bills at ten times its real size. Fan-out matters just as much: every subscription attached to a topic re-bills the same bytes on delivery.
Teams size Pub/Sub on message counts and are then surprised by the bill, when the two real drivers are the size floor on small events and the number of subscriptions on a busy topic. Confirm the current per-TiB throughput and retention prices in the Google Cloud pricing calculator for your region.
This calculator takes 11 inputs: Messages published per month, Average message payload, Minimum billed bytes per message, Subscriptions per topic, Price per TiB of throughput, Free throughput allotment, Message backlog retained, Retained storage price per GiB, Snapshot storage, Cross-region egress, Egress 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.
Usually yes. Because of the 1,000-byte minimum, packing ten 100-byte events into one message cuts billed throughput by roughly 90% — at the cost of coarser retry granularity and higher per-message latency.