[boulos]

Combined with per-minute billing and our lower on-demand pricing, regular GCE instances often end up being cheaper.

For example, a fixed duration m3.medium is currently $.037/hr for 1 hour and $.047/hr at 6 hours. GCE's equivalent n1-standard-1 is $.05/hr all the time (and automatically triggers sustained use discounts). If you ask for a 4-hour block and only use 3.2 hours you pay the same 16 cents as you would have on GCE. As I tell my friends, if you want a cheap, guaranteed VM just use GCE on-demand; if you're locked into AWS though, check out Spot!

Disclaimer: I work on Compute Engine (and Preemptible VMs specifically), so I'm clearly biased.