How to reduce GCP costs by up to 40% in 90 days

The problem: uncontrolled GCP bill

Many startups and SMBs come to me with a common problem:

"Our GCP bill suddenly went up €2,000/month and we don't know where."

This happens because no one is watching costs from the start. Development teams deploy without restrictions, and then surprises appear:

• Unused instances
• Obsolete storage
• Unexpected data egress
• Oversized databases

The solution: Systematic FinOps

I've helped 15+ companies reduce their costs between 20-40% in 90 days with these practices:

1. Cost audit (Week 1)

The first thing is to see where the money goes. In GCP:

• Activate Cloud Billing → Reports
• Identify top 5 services that consume
• Analyze trends (are they going up or down?)

Typical result: You find 30-40% of unjustified spending

2. Quick wins (Week 2-3)

Now you eat low-hanging fruit:

A. Turn off idle resources

# Instances that haven't been used in 30 days
gcloud compute instances list --filter="lastStop<-P30D"

Typical savings: 15-20%

B. Rightsizing

Change machines from n1-standard-8 to n2d-standard-4 if you don't need them. Savings: 30-40% on compute

C. Committed Use Discounts

If you have predictable workloads, commit for 1 or 3 years. Savings: 25-55% vs on-demand

3. Automation (Week 4-6)

Now you automate so you don't have to check manually:

A. Budgets and alerts

gcloud billing budgets create \
  --billing-account=XXXXX \
  --display-name="Monthly limit" \
  --budget-amount=5000EUR \
  --threshold-rule=percent=80

B. Schedules for dev/stage

Turn off non-production environments at night:

gcloud compute instances add-labels INSTANCE \
  --labels=env=dev,schedule=weekdays-9to18

Then a Cloud Function turns them on/off automatically.

4. Continuous monitoring (Ongoing)

Create Looker Studio dashboards with:

• Cost by project/team
• Trends (weekly comparison)
• Top 10 most expensive resources

Review monthly and adjust.

Real case: EdTech startup

Before:

• €8,500/month in GCP
• No visibility by project
• Oversized instances

Actions:

• Rightsizing: €2,800/month saved
• Schedules (dev/test): €1,200/month saved
• CDN optimization: €600/month saved

After:

• €3,900/month (-54%)
• Full visibility
• Automated alerts

Conclusions

Reducing costs in GCP is not magic, it's discipline:

1. Audit → know where it goes
2. Quick wins → eat low-hanging fruit
3. Automate → don't depend on memory
4. Monitor → adjust course

If you need help with a GCP audit, schedule a free call.