The Google Cloud Billing API programmatically accesses your cloud billing data. It lets you retrieve detailed cost and usage information to build cost management custom solutions, automate billing processes, and give deeper cloud spend insights.
Essentially, it transforms raw billing data into actionable intelligence.
Billing data becomes powerful only when transformed into insight
The API does not manage billing itself, but rather provides the data required to do so properly. It solves the problem of having to download CSV reports manually and work at analyzing them.
Instead, you are able to integrate billing data directly into your existing monitoring, alerting, and reporting systems.
Currently, the API has a RESTful interface that returns JSON responses. While there are no rigidly defined “versions” as such, the API does change regularly with the addition of new features and enhancements.
It’s a core component of the GCP Financial Management suite, working alongside the Billing Console and Cost Management tools.
Cloud Billing data to BigQuery is a powerful way to analyze your Google Cloud usage, costs, and pricing information in a scalable, queryable format.
This process automatically sends detailed billing data to a BigQuery dataset, enabling advanced analytics, reporting, and visualization with tools like Looker Studio or custom SQL queries.
GCP offers multiple types of billing exports to BigQuery:
- Standard usage cost data
- Detailed usage cost data
- Pricing data export
BigQuery Console is for humans, BigQuery API is for automation, integration, and applications.
BigQuery offers several ways to interact with its services programmatically:
- REST API
- Client Libraries
A REST API is an interface that allows different computer systems to communicate over the internet using the REST (Representational State Transfer) architectural style.
It uses standard HTTP methods to perform operations on resources.
Client libraries are ready-made code packages (SDKs) provided by a platform (like Google, AWS, Azure) that allow developers to interact with their services easily without writing raw API calls.
A pre-built software library that wraps a service’s REST API and provides easy-to-use functions.
BigQuery isn’t just storage—it’s the engine for cloud financial visibility
