Dive Brief:

• Google rolled out its Cloud Billing Catalog API Tuesday, which allows customers to "predict bills, estimate costs and reconcile rates" while using list GCP pricing, according to a company announcement.

• The catalog provides a list of all SKUs from within the service including a "human-readable description of the SKU," list pricing, regions the SKU can be purchased in and categorization data of the SKU, according to the announcement.

• The Cloud Billing Catalog API can also be used with other cost management tools already in place.

Dive Insight:

Cloud providers frequently adjust the costs of cloud-based offerings, and to gain a more competitive edge in the market, vendors are developing new ways customers can stretch a dollar.

Google and Microsoft already offered customers a pay-per-minute billing model for computing workloads. However, in September, AWS shook up that style of billing with a pay-per-second approach.

Amazon is quick to accommodate customers' personal billing practices. The company revealed that AWS has given up "hundreds of millions of dollars" a year due to accommodate customer needs and product effectiveness. If customers do not match the cloud they pay for, AWS alerts customers. This way customers don't pay for storage they're not using. 

Looking at the other cloud giants, in terms of APIs, Microsoft's API Management is set up in three tiers — developer, standard and premium — each with a standard rate. AWS allows customers to pay only when they are using their APIs for received calls or transferring out data.

The cloud API market is dependent upon how well different clouds can collaborate. Integrating applications in the cloud using APIs is particularly critical when more than 80% of organizations use a multi-cloud solution.