GCP Defaults Every VM to Premium Network and You're Paying 40% More for Egress You Don't Need 🌐

GCP has two network tiers: Premium ($0.12/GB) and Standard ($0.085/GB). Premium routes traffic over Google's private backbone. Standard uses the public internet. The catch? Premium is the default for every resource you create. Your dev VMs, staging APIs, internal tools - all paying premium egress rates for traffic that doesn't need Google's backbone. Switch non-critical workloads to Standard Tier and save 30-45% on egress instantly. Most teams don't even know GCP has network tiers. They create resources, traffic flows, and the egress line item on their bill grows silently. For a workload doing 5 TB of egress per month in North America, the difference between Premium and Standard is roughly $225/month - just from one config change. And that's before we add Cloud CDN, which can cut egress costs by another 60-80% for cacheable content. Let's fix both with Terraform. 📊 The Egress Pricing Cheat Sheet Premium Tier (default): Monthly Volume North America Europe Asia 0-1 TB $0.12/GB $0.12/GB $