One of the key benefits that the cloud brings to developers is the promise of reducing the cost of hosting applications. "Pay per use" is mentioned by every cloud vendor, but that by itself is not a magic wand by which the bills get reduced. A typical pattern is to observe monthly bills, see which services ended up being costly, then look at re-architecting bits and pieces of the application. Google Cloud Platform, which is fast becoming a strong alternative to Amazon Web Services, wants to make the task easier by providing a billing API that provides programmatic access to your daily Google Cloud Platform usage and cost estimates.
