---
title: "gcp-skills"
description: "Field notes for running Google Cloud without overpaying for it: where cost actually comes from, the billing-export traps that produce confident wrong numbers, and the Cloud Run billing model that charges an instance for "
canonical: https://agentpluginsdirectory.com/plugins/gcp-skills--alanblythe
last-updated: 2026-10-02
---

# gcp-skills
Field notes for running Google Cloud without overpaying for it: where cost actually comes from, the billing-export traps that produce confident wrong numbers, and the Cloud Run billing model that charges an instance for existing.
- Slug: gcp-skills--alanblythe
- Publisher: Alan Blythe
- Repository: https://github.com/alanblythe/gcp-skills
- Manifest: plugin.json
- Version: 0.1.0
- License: Apache-2.0
- Category (editorial): devops-cloud
- Skills: 2 (gcp-cost-analysis, gcp-cost-cloud-run)
- MCP servers: 0
- Stars: 0
- Repository created: 2026-08-16
- Repository last pushed: 2026-08-17
- Publisher type: User
- Listing: https://agentpluginsdirectory.com/plugins/gcp-skills--alanblythe
- Schema: https://agent-plugins.org/schemas/1.0.0/plugin.schema.json

## What gcp-skills does, in the publisher's words

Skills for running Google Cloud without overpaying for it, the parts that are easy to get wrong and slow to notice: which resources bill for existing rather than working, why a service with min-instances = 0 can bill continuously, why identical Terraform costs different amounts in two environments, and the query mistakes that make a cost report internally consistent and wrong.

Derived from running deployments. Where a claim was verified by observation, billing-export SKUs reconciled against Cloud Monitoring and the resource APIs, the skill marks it; where the configuration and the bill disagree, both are recorded, because that disagreement is usually the finding.

The split is measurement and diagnosis. The analysis skill is what you reach for when the bill is up and the cause is unknown; the Cloud Run skill is what you reach for once the cause is narrowed to a service whose cost has come loose from its traffic.

From the project README, punctuation lightly normalized. Full text: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alanblythe/gcp-skills/HEAD/README.md

## Skills

- gcp-cost-analysis: This skill should be used when finding out where GCP money actually goes: "why is my GCP bill up", "what is driving cost", "how do I query GCP spend", "billing export", "cost anomaly", "which resource costs the most", "what is my run rate", "why did this month jump", "how do I attribute cost to a s…
- gcp-cost-cloud-run: This skill should be used when Cloud Run costs more than its traffic explains: "why is Cloud Run so expensive", "my service has min-instances 0 but CPU stays high", "why does the service never scale to zero", "instance-based vs request-based billing", "why does staging cost less than prod with the…

Descriptions come from the frontmatter of each SKILL.md, punctuation lightly normalized.