Real-time Pricing

MechCloud displays cost information directly in the plan output before any infrastructure changes are applied. This enables cost-aware infrastructure decisions during development rather than discovering costs after deployment.

Overview

When generating an execution plan, MechCloud calculates and displays comprehensive cost information for GCP resources that have associated costs.

Supported Billing Models

Model	How it appears in the plan	Examples
Usage-based (hourly)	Hourly rate + max monthly total (730 hours)	Compute Engine VM, GKE Cluster
Storage (GB-month)	Rate + total when size is known	Persistent Disk

Usage-Based Charges (Price + Cost)

For resources with predictable usage patterns, MechCloud shows both price rates and calculated costs:

• Compute Engine instance hours

• Persistent Disk storage (GB-Mo)

• GKE Cluster management fee

Example: A Compute Engine e2-micro instance shows price: $0.00835/Hrs, monthly: $6.10

Cost Change Tracking

MechCloud displays cost change percentages for all resource actions, helping you understand the financial impact of infrastructure changes.

Create Actions

When creating new resources, the cost change is +100% (from $0 to the new cost):

vm1 (action: create, price: $0.00835/Hrs, monthly: $6.10, change: +100%)

Update Actions

When modifying existing resources, the change percentage reflects the actual cost difference.

Delete Actions

When deleting resources, the cost change is -100% (from current cost to $0):

vm1 (action: delete, price: $0.00/Hrs, monthly: $0.00, change: -100%)

Plan Output Examples

Compute Engine Instance (Usage-Based Charges)

Compute Engine instances have predictable usage patterns, so MechCloud calculates and displays actual hourly and monthly costs.

Creating a Compute Engine instance:

defaults:
  zone: us-central1-a

resources:
  - type: compute.v1.instance
    name: vm1
    props:
      machine_type: machineTypes/e2-micro
      disks:
        - boot: true
          auto_delete: true
          initialize_params:
            disk_size_gb: 30
            disk_type: diskTypes/pd-standard
            source_image: projects/ubuntu-os-cloud/global/images/family/ubuntu-2404-lts
      network_interfaces:
        - subnetwork: subnetworks/subnet1
          access_configs:
            - type: ONE_TO_ONE_NAT
              name: External NAT

Plan output:

vm1 (action: create)
=> Price (vCPU) - price: $0.02289/Hrs, quantity: 2, monthly: $33.42, change: +100%
=> Price (RAM) - price: $0.00308/GB-Hrs, quantity: 1, monthly: $2.25, change: +100%
=> Price (Boot Disk) - price: $0.04/GB-Mo, quantity: 30, monthly: $1.20, change: +100%

The plan shows:

• vCPU price: Calculated hourly cost for vCPUs.

• RAM price: Calculated hourly cost for Memory (GB).

• Boot Disk: Calculated monthly cost for the specified Persistent Disk.

• Monthly: Estimated monthly cost (hourly × 730 hours).

• Change: +100% - new resource.

Supported Resources

MechCloud provides real-time pricing for a comprehensive set of GCP resource types including compute, storage, networking, databases, and other services.

For the complete list of supported resources with pricing examples, see Examples (Resources With Cost).

Regional Pricing

Costs vary by GCP region. MechCloud automatically applies region-specific pricing.

Using Pricing Data

Track Environment Costs

When generating plans for different Resource Contexts:

Development environment (context: app-dev)
Monthly cost: $125.43

Production environment (context: app-prod)
Monthly cost: $892.15

Best Practices

Include cost justification in code comments - Document why specific instance types or sizes were chosen.

Compare costs during code review - Review cost deltas alongside configuration changes.

Track cost trends over time - Save plan outputs to monitor infrastructure cost evolution.

Use Resource Context for cost isolation - Separate cost tracking by environment (dev, staging, prod).

Monitor actual vs estimated costs - Compare MechCloud estimates against actual cloud bills to refine understanding.

Integration with Stateless IaC

Real-time pricing works seamlessly with MechCloud's stateless architecture:

Fresh pricing every plan - No stale data from state files

Accurate cost deltas - Costs compared against actual current state

Environment isolation - Resource Context enables per-environment cost tracking

Next Steps

• Examples (Resources With Cost)

• Authoring Desired State