Artifact Registry Costs: Storage, Egress and Cleanup
A registry never sleeps, so the saving is in what you keep and where it travels.
How the bill is built
Artifact Registry is storage for container images and language packages, so there is no compute to schedule and no stop operation. Google’s pricing page charges for two things:
- Storage, per gibibyte-month, with the first 0.5 GiB-month free per billing account and the same rate for regional and multi-regional repositories.
- Data transfer out of the repository. Moves within the same location are free; transfer to other regions or to the internet is billed per gibibyte.
That makes the cost driver simple to state: every image layer pushed and never deleted keeps billing, and every pull across a region boundary adds a transfer charge.
The lever: cleanup policies, tested with a dry run
Google provides cleanup policies that delete or keep artifacts by rule. A policy can match on age (olderThan, newerThan), on tag state (tagged, untagged or any), and on tag, version or package name prefixes. A keep policy with mostRecentVersions protects the last N versions of each package so a release you might roll back to never disappears.
Two details matter before you switch one on. You can run a policy in dry run mode, where audit logs record what would have been deleted without deleting it. And Google notes that policy changes take effect within approximately one day, so a new rule is not an instant purge.
Placement is the second lever. Pulling images from a repository in the same location as the cluster or VM that uses them avoids the cross-region transfer charge.
What ZopNight adds
ZopNight discovers each registry and its repositories as a parent-child hierarchy, and a dedicated enrichment step records the image count and total size per repository. In the resource list you can drill from a registry into its repositories and read each one’s size and image count, which is how you find the repository that a CI pipeline has been filling with untagged builds.
Registry spend also flows through cost reports and budgets like any other GCP charge. ZopNight’s recommendation catalog does not yet include Artifact Registry rules, so ZopNight does not propose deletions here; the cleanup policy itself is configured in Google Cloud. For the broader question of stale storage across clouds, see orphan cleanup.
The resource entry, including its discovery fields, is on the Artifact Registry fact sheet.