# Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Canonical: https://inetgeek.com/queues/google-pubsub/

Google Cloud's messaging service, billed per TiB of throughput with message storage charged separately by the GiB-month.

## Who it suits

Google Cloud systems that want messaging without capacity planning — throughput is metered rather than provisioned, and 10 GiB a month costs nothing.

Consider something else if Throughput counts bytes both in and out, so a message read once is billed twice, and retention is a storage charge rather than an included window — the headline $40 per TiB is not the whole bill.

## What the documentation says

### Pricing

- Free tier: Yes ([source](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Pricing model: Three meters: throughput at $40 per TiB counting both publish and subscribe, storage at $0.27 per GiB-month for anything retained beyond a day, and data transfer when throughput crosses a zone or region boundary. Pub/Sub Lite is a separate product priced on reserved capacity rather than usage. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

### Observability

- Ingest price per GB: $40 per TiB, which is $0.039 per GiB, for standard publish and subscribe throughput in every Google Cloud region. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

### Queues

- Included per month: 10 GiB of throughput free per billing account per calendar month, then $40 per TiB. Throughput counts bytes written to a topic plus bytes read from a subscription, so a message published once and read once is billed twice. BigQuery and Cloud Storage subscriptions are $50 per TiB and the 10 GiB does not apply to them; import topics run $50 or $80 per TiB by source. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Maximum message size: Pub/Sub bills on bytes rather than message count; the pricing page states no per-message size ceiling and prices throughput and storage instead. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing), read 2026-09-06)
- Message retention: Retention is configurable and charged rather than granted: $0.27 per GiB-month for messages a topic is configured to retain, for snapshots, and for a subscription's backlog older than one day. A subscription's default retention is 7 days. ([source](https://cloud.google.com/pubsub/pricing), read 2026-09-06)

## Compared with

- [Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs Amazon SQS](https://inetgeek.com/compare/amazon-sqs-vs-google-pubsub/)
- [Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs Cloudflare Queues](https://inetgeek.com/compare/cloudflare-queues-vs-google-pubsub/)
- [Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs Upstash QStash](https://inetgeek.com/compare/google-pubsub-vs-qstash/)
- [Google Cloud Pub/Sub vs Azure Queue Storage](https://inetgeek.com/compare/azure-queue-storage-vs-google-pubsub/)