How to Share Your GCP Billing Data

To produce your cost leak report, we need a 30-day summary of your GCP spend by service and SKU. You run a query against your own billing export table and share the results — no IAM grants, no service accounts, no access to your GCP environment.

The whole thing takes about five minutes.

Prerequisites

You need Cloud Billing export to BigQuery enabled on your billing account. If it's already enabled, skip to Step 2. If not, follow Step 1 first — note that export is not backfilled, so only usage from the moment it's enabled will be captured.

1. Enable billing export (if not already active)

In the Google Cloud console, go to Billing → Billing export → BigQuery export. Under Detailed usage cost, click Edit settings, select a project and dataset (or create a new dataset called billing_export), and save. Data starts flowing within a few hours.

If you're unsure whether export is already enabled, check Billing → Billing export — if a dataset is listed under BigQuery export, you're good.

2. Run the summary query

Open BigQuery in the Google Cloud console and run the following query. Replace your_project.your_dataset.gcp_billing_export_v1_XXXXXX with your actual billing export table name.

SELECT
  invoice.month AS invoice_month,
  service.description AS service,
  sku.description AS sku,
  project.id AS project_id,
  SUM(cost) AS cost,
  SUM((SELECT SUM(c.amount) FROM UNNEST(credits) c)) AS credits,
  SUM(cost) + SUM((SELECT SUM(c.amount) FROM UNNEST(credits) c)) AS net_cost,
  SUM(usage.amount) AS usage_amount,
  usage.unit AS usage_unit
FROM
  `your_project.your_dataset.gcp_billing_export_v1_XXXXXX`
WHERE
  _PARTITIONTIME >= TIMESTAMP_SUB(CURRENT_TIMESTAMP(), INTERVAL 60 DAY)
GROUP BY
  invoice_month, service, sku, project_id, usage_unit
HAVING
  net_cost > 0.01
ORDER BY
  net_cost DESC

This returns a pre-aggregated summary — typically a few hundred rows, under 100KB. No resource names, no user data, no sensitive metadata. Just spend by service, SKU, and project ID.

3. Export and share the results

Click Save Results → CSV in the BigQuery console. Then either:

Upload it on our cost report page, or
Email it to contact@branebridge.com with your company name and approximate monthly GCP spend

That's it. We'll review the data and send back your cost leak report within 48 hours — a one-page estimate (conservative / expected / aggressive) with your top 3 opportunity areas by dollar impact.

What happens next

If the report shows meaningful savings potential and you want to go deeper, the next step is a 7-day read-only audit under NDA. That's when we request scoped, read-only IAM access to your GCP environment to look at utilization metrics, resource configs, and query patterns — everything needed to turn opportunity areas into a specific, prioritized savings plan.

You can revoke access at any time, and implementation is always gated through PRs and IaC review.

FAQ

Do I need to grant BraneBridge any access for the initial report? No. You run the query yourself and share the output. We never touch your GCP environment for the cost leak report.

What if I don't have billing export enabled yet? Enable it now (Step 1) and reach out — we can start the report as soon as you have ~7 days of data, though 30+ days gives us a much better picture.

Can I just send a screenshot of my billing dashboard instead? The dashboard view doesn't break down by SKU, which is where most of the savings hide. The query above takes five minutes and gives us 10x more signal.