Workflows pricing

This document explains Workflows pricing details. You can also use the Google Cloud Pricing Calculator to estimate the cost of using Workflows.

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Pricing overview

Workflows pricing is calculated monthly based on the number of workflow steps executed.

Steps may be classified as internal or external. Internal and external steps are priced differently.

The following count toward the total of workflow steps executed:

• Any step that executes successfully.
• Any step that fails during execution.
• Any step that is retried during a workflow execution. Each retry attempt counts as a step execution.

For information about handling retries, see Retrying steps.

Internal and external steps

There are two different kinds of steps:

• Internal steps: Steps that occur inside of Google Cloud when you execute your workflow.

  Types of internal steps include:

  • Requests sent to *.googleapis.com APIs
  • Requests sent to APIs running on Compute Engine, Google Kubernetes Engine, or Kubernetes and using *.cloud.goog domain names
  • Requests sent to APIs running on App Engine and using *.appspot.com domain names
  • Cloud Functions invocations
  • Cloud Run invocations using *.run.app domain names
  • Assigning and evaluating variables
  • Evaluating conditional statements
  • Calls to user-defined subworkflows or built-in functions (standard library and connectors)
  • Polling attempts made by connectors for long-running operations and controlled using connector_params.polling_policy

• External steps: Steps that make an external HTTP request to resources outside of Google Cloud, or wait for HTTP callbacks.

  Types of external steps include:

  • Requests sent to external APIs
  • Requests sent to Google Cloud resources that use custom domains
  • Steps that wait for a callback to be received using events.await_callback

You incur charges for increments of 1,000 internal steps or external steps. For an example of how this works, see this pricing example.

Subworkflow costs

Pricing for subworkflows is calculated using the same pricing guidelines as a regular workflow. As a result, calling a subworkflow generates costs equal to the cost of all of the subworkflow's steps plus the cost of the step that calls the subworkflow.

Free usage

As part of the Google Cloud Free Tier, Workflows provides resources that are free to use up to specific limits. These usage limits are available both during and after the free trial period. If you are no longer in the free trial period, you incur charges beyond these Always Free limits according to the pricing table.

Pricing table

If you pay in a currency other than USD, the prices listed in your currency on Cloud Platform SKUs apply.

Pricing example

Your monthly cost comes from the total number of internal and external steps performed in all of your workflow executions. The billing calculation subtracts the free usage from each total, counts the number of 1,000 increments that you have fully or partially used for each category, multiplies each count by the associated unit cost, then adds those results together to get the total charges.

For example, if your workflow executions use a total of 6,500 internal steps and 3,999 external steps in one month:

• Total internal steps that you used: 6,500

  • Internal steps that the free tier covers: 5,000
  • Additional internal steps: 1,500
    • Fully or partially used increments of 1,000 steps: 2
    • Cost for 2 increments of internal steps: 2 * $0.01 = $0.02

• Total external steps that you used: 3,999

  • External steps that the free tier covers: 2,000
  • Additional internal steps: 1,999
    • Fully or partially used increments of 1,000 steps: 2
    • Cost for 2 increments of external steps: 2 * $0.025 = $0.05

• Total charges for the month: $0.02 + $0.05 = $0.07

What's next

• Read the Workflows documentation.
• Get started with Workflows.
• Try the Pricing calculator.
• Learn about Workflows solutions and use cases.