Event streaming · Google

Google Cloud Pub/Sub

Google Cloud's fully managed, serverless messaging service for asynchronous event ingestion between applications and analytics pipelines.

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Pub/Sub is Google Cloud's globally distributed, serverless publish-subscribe messaging service, commonly used as the ingestion point feeding Dataflow, BigQuery or other downstream processing. It requires no capacity planning or broker management; topics and subscriptions autoscale, and push/pull delivery, ordering keys, and exactly-once processing are built in. BigQuery and Cloud Storage subscriptions can write incoming messages directly to those destinations without a separate consumer application. Billing is purely usage-based per volume of data delivered (measured per TiB) plus storage for retained/unacknowledged messages, with a modest recurring free allowance, making it economical for spiky or low-volume workloads but potentially costlier than a self-managed cluster at very high sustained throughput.

At a glance

Vendor Google
Pricing model Usage-based
Free tier Yes
Deployment Cloud
Open source No
Best for GCP-native teams needing serverless, low-maintenance event ingestion feeding analytics pipelines.

Pricing

Billed per TiB of message throughput delivered, plus per GiB-month for retained message storage; the first 10 GiB of standard throughput per month is free.

Plan Price Notes
Message delivery $40 per TiB After the first 10 GiB/month free (Message Delivery Basic SKU), all Google Cloud regions
BigQuery / Cloud Storage subscriptions $50 per TiB For subscribe throughput read from a subscription; the first 10 GiB/month is not free for these subscription types
Storage $0.27 per GiB-month Applies to retained or unacknowledged messages

Prices read from the vendor's own page on September 21, 2026. Vendors change prices; check the source before you budget.

Features

  • Serverless, autoscaling topics and subscriptions
  • Push and pull delivery
  • Exactly-once processing support
  • Message ordering keys
  • Direct BigQuery and Cloud Storage subscriptions
  • Global availability and replication

Integrations

Profile last reviewed September 21, 2026

Alternatives

Amazon Kinesis AWS's managed service for real-time data streaming, ingesting and processing continuous data at scale without managing servers. Apache Kafka Open-source distributed event streaming platform for high-throughput publish-subscribe messaging and durable event logs. Confluent Fully managed Kafka service from Kafka's original creators, adding schema registry, connectors and stream processing on top.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub in the index now

Terms to know

Event tracking Capturing specific user actions, such as clicks or purchases, as discrete, named pieces of data. Data pipeline The automated sequence of steps that moves data from source systems to a destination, transforming it along the way. Event streaming Continuously publishing and consuming records of things that happened, in order, through a durable, replayable log. Exactly-once processing A processing guarantee that each event affects the result exactly once, even after retries or redelivery.

Related guides

How to choose an event streaming platform Kafka's protocol won the ecosystem; the real decision is who operates the cluster and whether you need Kafka compatibility at all.