Google Cloud Monitoring pricing for GCP uptime checks
The first million executions a month are free, and that sounds like a lot. Whether it is depends almost entirely on the check interval. Enter your checks to see where the free tier ends and what each one costs after it.
Checks that fit in the free million, per project
GCP uptime check cost calculator
LiveRate read from Google Cloud's Observability pricing page, in USD: $0.30 per 1,000 uptime check executions after 1 million free per project each month. Month of 730 hours, as in Google's own examples. Alerting is not billed until at least September 2027. List price before any negotiated discount.
How much do Google Cloud uptime checks cost?
Google Cloud Monitoring charges $0.30 per 1,000 uptime check executions, after 1 million free executions per Google Cloud project each month. Every checker region runs the check separately and every check needs at least three, so one check every minute is 131,400 executions in an average month. The free million covers seven such checks. From the eighth onward each one-minute check costs $39.42 a month, or $78.84 with the Global region setting the console selects by default.
Google's model is the opposite of a per-monitor price. There is no charge per check and no charge per feature: content matching, SSL certificate validation and custom headers cost nothing extra. The single meter is executions, and three settings multiply into it (interval, regions and targets). That makes a slow check almost free and a fast one surprisingly expensive, with nothing in between to warn you, because the free million absorbs the first several checks and the bill only appears when it runs out.
The short version
- Rate
- $0.30 per 1,000 executions
- Free allowance
- 1 million executions per project a month
- One check, every minute, 3 regions
- 131,400 executions, $39.42 past the free tier
- Same check from Global
- 262,800 executions, $78.84
- Alerting
- Not billed before September 2027
GCP uptime check cost per check by interval and region
What one check with one target costs each month once the free million is used up, and how many such checks the free million holds by itself. Google allows only four intervals, and three regions is the floor.
| Interval | Regions | Executions a month | Cost past free tier | Checks the free million covers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every 1 minute | 3, USA, or 3 single regions | 131,400 | $39.42 | 7 |
| Every 1 minute | 6, Global, the console default | 262,800 | $78.84 | 3 |
| Every 5 minutes | 3, USA | 26,280 | $7.88 | 38 |
| Every 5 minutes | 6, Global | 52,560 | $15.77 | 19 |
| Every 10 minutes | 3, USA | 13,140 | $3.94 | 76 |
| Every 15 minutes | 3, USA | 8,760 | $2.63 | 100, the 100 check quota binds first |
Default settings
3 checks
The API defaults to a one-minute interval and the console to Global. At those settings the free million runs out during the fourth check, and every check after that adds $78.84 a month.
Interval is the price
15x
A one-minute check runs 15 times as often as a 15 minute one and costs 15 times as much. The only thing you buy with that money is detection speed: a 15 minute check can miss an outage for a quarter of an hour.
Where Google is genuinely free
100 checks
At 15 minute intervals from three regions, a full project of 100 checks is 876,000 executions, inside the free million. If slow detection is acceptable, this costs nothing at all.
Google Cloud uptime check cost for 10, 20, 50 and 100 checks
Monthly totals for one project, one target per check, after the free million. The last column is the UptimeHub plan that covers the same number of monitors, each checked every minute from six regions on Starter and every 30 seconds on Pro, with alerts and a status page included.
| Checks | 1 min, 3 regions | 1 min, Global | 5 min, 3 regions | 5 min, Global | UptimeHub |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | $0.00 | $94.20 | $0.00 | $0.00 | Starter, $24 yearly or $49 monthly |
| 10 | $94.20 | $488.40 | $0.00 | $0.00 | Starter, $24 yearly or $49 monthly |
| 20 | $488.40 | $1,276.80 | $0.00 | $15.36 | Starter, $24 yearly or $49 monthly |
| 50 | $1,671.00 | $3,642.00 | $94.20 | $488.40 | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
| 100 | $3,642.00 | $7,584.00 | $488.40 | $1,276.80 | Pro, $49 yearly or $99 monthly |
Where Google stops being the cheap option
At one-minute checks from three regions, eight checks cost $15.36 a month and the ninth takes the bill to $54.78, past UptimeHub Starter ($24 yearly, $49 monthly) and Pro billed yearly ($49). From Global, the fifth check does it ($94.20). The same 1,314,000 executions that cost $94.20 are five Global checks, ten USA checks, or fifty five-minute USA checks: Google bills the executions, not what you were trying to watch.
Where Google stays cheaper
At five-minute checks from three regions, 38 checks are free and 44 cost $46.90, so a fleet that tolerates five-minute detection stays under Starter's $49 monthly price until the 45th check. At 15 minutes the whole 100 check quota is free. If your services already run on GCP and a few minutes of blind time is acceptable, stay on Google.
The rest of Google Cloud Monitoring pricing
Uptime checks are one line on a longer Cloud Monitoring rate card. These are the meters a team running uptime checks is most likely to meet, read from the same Google pricing page.
| Meter | Price | Free each month |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime check executions | $0.30 per 1,000 | 1 million per project |
| Synthetic monitor executions | $1.20 per 1,000 | 100 per billing account, plus Cloud Run, Storage and Logging charges |
| Metric data ingested | $0.2580 per MiB, falling to $0.0610 | First 150 MiB per billing account; non-chargeable Google Cloud metrics free |
| Managed Prometheus samples | $0.06 per million, falling to $0.024 | None |
| Monitoring API reads | $0.50 per million time series | 1 million per billing account; writes free |
| Alerting policies | $0.35 per metric reference a month, plus $0.50 per million points | Not charged before September 1, 2027 |
Synthetic monitors are 4x
A scripted check is $1.20 per 1,000 runs against $0.30 for an uptime check, the free allowance is 100 runs rather than a million, and each run also bills a Cloud Run function.
Alerts are free, for now
Google has postponed alerting charges to no sooner than September 2027. When they start, each uptime alert policy carries at least $0.35 a month, plus a points charge Google has not yet made easy to estimate.
No status page
Cloud Monitoring has dashboards for your team and nothing for customers. A public status page is a separate purchase.
Inside the thing it watches
If the GCP account behind the checks has a billing hold or a permissions mistake, the monitoring goes with it. An outside monitor keeps watching from a separate account.
When GCP uptime checks are the right buy, and when to move them out
Keep them on Google Cloud when
- Five or fifteen minute detection is good enough, which keeps dozens of checks inside the free million.
- The checks feed SLOs and dashboards you already run in Cloud Monitoring, so the data belongs next to your other metrics.
- You need private uptime checks against internal services on a VPC, which an outside monitor cannot reach.
Move the customer-facing checks out when
- You want one-minute or faster detection on more than about eight endpoints, where each check costs $39.42 to $78.84 a month.
- The endpoints live outside GCP, on other clouds, SaaS tools or client sites.
- Customers expect a status page, and the team wants Slack, SMS and webhook alerts plus domain expiry warnings in one place.
- You want the bill to be a number you can put in a budget rather than a product of three settings.
Google is the cheapest of the three big clouds per execution, $0.0003 against $0.0005 for an Azure Application Insights availability test and $0.0012 for an AWS canary, and it is the only one with a free allowance large enough to matter. AWS takes a different route altogether: Route 53 health checks are flat per check with paid options. The three are set side by side in cloud uptime check pricing on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and the wider market is in the synthetic monitoring pricing comparison.
Where these numbers come from, and what is deliberately not claimed
The execution rate, the free million per project, the synthetic monitor rate and the postponed alerting charges come from the Monitoring pricing summary on Google Cloud's Observability pricing page. The counting rule (interval, regions and targets multiplied over a 730 hour month) and the region map come from Google's pricing examples page, and our calculator reproduces Google's own worked example exactly: a 10 member group checked every minute from the USA location is 1,314,000 executions and $94.20. The allowed intervals and the one-minute default come from the Cloud Monitoring API reference, the three checker minimum and the Global console default from the uptime check guide, and the 100 check limit from the quotas page. We do not assume how points returned will be counted for an uptime alert policy once alerting is billed, what private uptime checks add in networking, or any negotiated discount.
GCP uptime check pricing questions
How much do Google Cloud uptime checks cost?
Google Cloud Monitoring charges $0.30 per 1,000 uptime check executions after the first 1 million executions each month, which are free per Google Cloud project. Each region a check runs from is a separate execution, so a check every minute from the minimum three regions uses 131,400 executions a month and costs $39.42 once you are past the free million.
Are GCP uptime checks free?
Up to a point. The first 1 million executions per project each month are free, which is seven one-minute checks from three regions, 38 five-minute checks, or all 100 checks a project allows at a 15 minute interval from three regions. Past that, every execution is billed at $0.30 per 1,000, and nothing about the check itself is free.
How many uptime check executions are there in a month?
Google calculates with a 730 hour month, which is 43,800 minutes. Divide by the interval and multiply by the number of checker regions and by the number of targets. One check every minute from the USA location (three regions) is 3 x 43,800 = 131,400 executions; every five minutes from Global (six regions) it is 52,560.
How many regions does a Google Cloud uptime check use?
At least three. The USA location contains three checkers (Oregon, Iowa and Virginia), while Europe, South America and Asia Pacific contain one each, and Global uses all six. Choosing Global in the console, which is the default, doubles the executions and the bill compared with checking from the USA location alone.
What check intervals can a GCP uptime check use?
Only four: 1, 5, 10 or 15 minutes, and the API defaults to 1 minute. There is no 30 second option. Because the interval divides straight into the execution count, moving a check from 1 minute to 5 minutes cuts its cost by 80%, and 15 minutes cuts it by 93%.
Does a resource group uptime check cost more?
Yes. A check pointed at a resource group runs once per member, so a 10 instance group counts as 10 targets. Google's own pricing example is exactly that: a 10 member group checked every minute from the USA location is 1,314,000 executions, and after the free million it costs $94.20 a month.
Do Google Cloud uptime check alerts cost money?
Not today. Google has announced alerting charges of $0.35 a month per metric reference in an alerting policy, plus $0.50 per million points returned, starting no sooner than September 1, 2027. Until then uptime alert policies are not billed. Google lists no separate charge for email, SMS or webhook notifications, though SMS volume is capped by quota.
How much do Google Cloud synthetic monitors cost?
Synthetic monitors are a separate meter at $1.20 per 1,000 executions, four times the uptime check rate, with only 100 free executions per billing account each month. Each run also invokes a Cloud Run function, so you pay Cloud Run, Cloud Storage and Cloud Logging charges on top of the execution fee.
Can GCP uptime checks validate SSL certificates?
Yes. HTTPS uptime checks have a Validate SSL certificates option and report time until certificate expiry as a metric you can alert on, at no extra charge per feature. Content matching is also included. Unlike Route 53, Google does not price options separately: everything rides on the execution count.
How many uptime checks can one Google Cloud project have?
Google's quota page lists 100 uptime check configurations per metrics scope. A larger fleet has to be split across scopes. Because the free million is granted per project, splitting also changes the bill, so total cost depends on how checks are distributed rather than only on how many there are.
Is GCP uptime monitoring cheaper than an uptime monitoring tool?
At 5 or 15 minute intervals it is very cheap, often free. At one-minute checks it is not: the ninth one-minute check from three regions takes the monthly bill to $54.78, above UptimeHub Starter at $24 billed yearly and Pro at $49, which cover 20 and 100 monitors with alerts and a status page.
One-minute checks without an execution meter
UptimeHub checks your sites, APIs and ports from six regions outside your cloud, every minute on Starter and every 30 seconds on Pro and above, confirms a failure from a second region before it alerts anyone, warns before SSL certificates and domains expire, and includes a branded status page on every plan. One price per monitor, whatever the interval.