Cloud Logging is Silently Eating Your GCP Budget at $0.50/GB (Here's How One Team Saved $140K) 📊

GCP charges $0.50 per GB of log ingestion. You get 50 GB free per project. After that, every health check, every debug statement, every verbose container log costs real money. Most teams don't notice until the bill arrives and Cloud Logging is the #2 line item. Exclusion filters, log sinks, and retention policies in Terraform fix this in under 30 minutes. Here's what makes Cloud Logging so expensive: every GCP service generates logs by default, and they all route to the _Default sink. Load balancer health checks hitting /healthz 100 times per minute? Logged. Kubernetes container stdout with DEBUG-level noise? Logged. VPC flow logs for internal traffic? Logged. You pay $0.50 for every GB of that. One company (Harness) found that just applying exclusion filters and routing logs to cheaper storage cut their logging bill in half, saving over $140K annually. Let's do the same with Terraform. 📊 Cloud Logging Pricing Cheat Sheet Component Cost Notes Log ingestion $0.50/GB The main cost driver