Memorystore for Redis Costs: No Stop, Only Sizing
A cache you cannot pause has to be sized right or retired; there is no middle setting.
What you are paying for
Google’s Memorystore for Redis pricing is built from four inputs: the service tier (Basic, standalone, or Standard, highly available), the provisioned capacity you choose when you create the instance, the region, and for Standard Tier the number of replicas. You are charged in 1-second increments based on provisioned capacity in GiB, and the capacity tier the instance falls into sets both the price and the throughput you can achieve. Enabling read replicas moves a Standard instance onto a different SKU priced by node count.
The key word is provisioned. A 10 GiB instance holding 1 GiB of keys bills for 10 GiB.
Why a schedule cannot switch it off
The Memorystore for Redis API (instances reference) offers create, delete, export, import, failover, patch, upgrade and maintenance rescheduling. There is no stop or pause method. An instance exists and bills, or it is deleted.
That leaves three real levers:
- Right-size provisioned capacity to the working set plus headroom, since price follows the capacity tier.
- Reconsider tier and replicas for non-production caches, where high availability may not be worth paying for.
- Delete caches nothing talks to, exporting an RDB snapshot to Cloud Storage first if you might need the data.
What ZopNight does
ZopNight can put a Memorystore instance on a schedule, but its stop only sets the read-replica count to zero, so the primary instance keeps billing and a Basic Tier instance saves nothing. The directory’s Memorystore scheduling notes cover the details.
The recommendation that applies is GCP Memorystore Instance Idle. It fires only when measured connections are below a small floor and, where the metric exists, command throughput is also zero across the window. With no client connected, the whole instance cost is the saving, and the finding says so. Because deleting a cache destroys data, this is a decision for a person: ZopNight’s safety gate classifies Memorystore as a stateful data service, and deletes on stateful types are never run automatically.
Memorystore spend also shows up in cost reports and can carry its own budget. Resource entry: the Memorystore fact sheet. Other GCP findings: GCP recommendations.