Google Cloud Build pricing in 2026
./cloud-build --per-build-minute --no-platform-fee
How much does Google Cloud Build cost in 2026?
Cloud Build is pure pay-as-you-go: no platform fee, no per-seat charge, you pay only for build time on the machine type you pick. On the default pool in US regions the default e2-standard-2 (2 vCPU) is $0.006 per build minute, the smaller e2-medium is $0.003, and the high-CPU machines rise to $0.0156 (8 vCPU) and $0.0624 (32 vCPU). Every billing account gets 2,500 free build-minutes a month on e2-standard-2. The total is simply your machine rate times your billable build minutes.
Google Cloud Build is Google's serverless CI/CD build service. Like AWS CodeBuild, it has no plans and no users to license: you point it at a source repo, pick a machine type, and pay per build minute. That makes it one of the cheapest managed CI options for small workloads (the 2,500 free build-minutes a month cover a lot of ground) and the natural pick for teams already on Google Cloud. The prices below are the default-pool rates from the public Cloud Build pricing update (effective 1 November 2025) and the Cloud Build pricing page, for US regions (us-central1, us-east4, us-west1). Rates vary by region; check the live figures for yours before committing.
Default-pool build-minute rates (US regions)
Every build runs on a machine type you choose. Bigger machines cost more per minute but finish parallelisable builds faster, so the cheapest total often comes from matching the size to the workload rather than always picking the smallest. e2-standard-2 is the default; e2-medium is the cheaper custom option for light builds.
| Machine type | vCPU / memory | $ / build minute |
|---|---|---|
| e2-medium | 2 vCPU (shared) / 4 GB | $0.003 |
| e2-standard-2 (default) | 2 vCPU / 8 GB | $0.006 |
| e2-highcpu-8 | 8 vCPU / 8 GB | $0.0156 |
| e2-highcpu-32 | 32 vCPU / 32 GB | $0.0624 |
Source: Cloud Build pricing update (effective 1 November 2025), default pool, US regions us-central1 / us-east4 / us-west1. Other regions run slightly higher (for example e2-highcpu-8 is $0.017628 in us-east1 and $0.019968 in asia-northeast1). Private pools are billed at a separate, higher per-minute rate. Verified August 2026.
The billing model in one paragraph
There is nothing to plan for and no seats to count. On the default pool you are billed per build minute for the machine type your build runs on, from build start to completion. The first 2,500 build minutes each month on e2-standard-2 are free, and that allowance resets every month. Everything else on the bill (artifacts in Artifact Registry or Cloud Storage, network egress, any Secret Manager reads your build makes) is billed by those services separately, not by Cloud Build. Private pools, which let builds reach private-network resources, are billed at their own higher per-minute rate and sit outside the free allowance.
Real monthly cost at three team sizes
These are our own models: the default-pool rate above times a realistic monthly build-minute volume for each team, on the default e2-standard-2 machine, minus the 2,500 free minutes. Swap in your own minute count and the arithmetic is the same.
4,000 build minutes minus 2,500 free, times $0.006, is $9. On e2-medium ($0.003) the same billable volume is about $4.50, and a lighter team that stays under 2,500 minutes pays nothing.
25,000 minutes minus 2,500 free at $0.006 is $135. Dropping short jobs to e2-medium ($0.003) roughly halves their share; running heavy jobs on e2-highcpu-8 costs more per minute but can finish in fewer minutes.
100,000 minutes minus 2,500 free at $0.006 is $585. At this volume the machine-type mix matters most: keep light jobs on e2-medium and reserve high-CPU machines for builds that genuinely parallelise.
Where Cloud Build wins and where it does not
Cloud Build is at its best when your world is already Google Cloud. Pulling base images from Artifact Registry, deploying to GKE, Cloud Run or App Engine, reading secrets from Secret Manager, writing artifacts to Cloud Storage: all of it is native, with no cross-cloud egress and no long-lived credentials to manage. The pay-per-minute model with no platform fee plus 2,500 free build-minutes a month means a small or bursty workload pays almost nothing, and e2-medium is the cheapest managed x86 build minute among the major clouds.
It is a weaker fit when you want a batteries-included CI experience. There is no marketplace of pre-built steps the way GitHub Actions has, no hosted macOS for iOS builds, and the pipeline UX is spartan compared with GitLab CI or CircleCI. Teams typically wire Cloud Build into Cloud Deploy or an external orchestrator rather than treating it as a full CI/CD platform on its own. If your source lives on GitHub and you want the richest ecosystem, GitHub Actions is usually the better home even though its per-minute rate is slightly higher; if you are already on AWS, AWS CodeBuild is the direct equivalent.
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