# Google Cloud Load Balancing

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/google-cloud-load-balancing/

Google Cloud's load balancers, billed per forwarding rule per hour with the first five priced higher than the rest.

## Who it suits

More than five forwarding rules. The price curve inverts at that point: the first five cost $0.025 an hour each and every rule after is $0.01, so the sixth is 60% cheaper than the fifth and the marginal cost keeps falling.

Consider something else if You have one or two rules and want a floor. Five rules cost $0.125 an hour before any traffic is processed, and regional data processing is charged on top by whichever region handles the request.

## iScore

53 / 100 (80% interval 46–60), rank 1 of 4 in load-balancing — interval overlaps the next rank, so this is an ordering, not a finding.

inetGeek's own reading, computed from sourced facts against category peers by disclosed rules. Not a provider claim. Intervals are 80%; a provider with few documented facts is pulled toward the category middle rather than scored on what little is known.
Method: https://inetgeek.com/iscore/. Full output with every criterion's basis: https://inetgeek.com/scores.json. Every load-balancing peer ranked: https://inetgeek.com/load-balancing/google-cloud-load-balancing/alternatives/

- Price: 31 (25–38), weight 36%, 0 of 2 criteria scored; scored for peers, not here — undocumented or stated without a number or a yes/limited/no: free_card_required, minimum_paid_price
- Capacity and limits: 63 (40–86), weight 29%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Trust and compliance: 50 (44–56), weight 21%, 1 of 1 criteria scored
- Evidence: 92 (92–92), weight 14%, 4 of 4 criteria scored

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Entry paid plan: $0.025 per hour for each of the first five forwarding rules, then $0.01 an hour for every rule after that — so the sixth rule costs 60% less than the fifth. Regional data processing is charged on top. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- Pricing model: Per forwarding rule per hour, with an inverted volume curve: the first five rules are the expensive ones at $0.025 an hour and everything beyond is $0.01. Data processing is charged by the region that handles the traffic, and there are no global data processing charges. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/pricing), read 2026-09-15)

### Infrastructure

- Regions: 47 regions are named individually on the pricing page, from Iowa (us-central1) to us-west8, each carrying its own forwarding-rule and data-processing rates. The rates themselves are not in the served page — they load behind a region selector — so the region list is sourceable here and the per-region price is not. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/pricing), read 2026-09-15)
- Uptime SLA: 99.99% monthly uptime. The load balancing commitment lives inside the Compute Engine SLA rather than on a page of its own — cloud.google.com/load-balancing/sla redirects there. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/load-balancing/sla), read 2026-09-15)

## Compared with

- [Google Cloud Load Balancing vs AWS Elastic Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/aws-elb-vs-google-cloud-load-balancing/)
- [Google Cloud Load Balancing vs Cloudflare Load Balancing](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-cloud-load-balancing-vs-cloudflare-load-balancing/)
- [Google Cloud Load Balancing vs DigitalOcean Load Balancers](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-cloud-load-balancing-vs-digitalocean-load-balancer/)