# GCP secrets pilot budget

Planning estimate checked 2026-11-04, Iowa, 730 hours/month. Keep the billing
account on unupgraded Free Trial. The confirmed $300 credit expires February 3,
2027; unused credit is not cash and does not extend the trial.

| Item | Monthly estimate USD |
|---|---:|
| Hub and trusted lightweight MCPs, e2-medium (4 GiB) | 24.46 |
| Private OpenBao, e2-small (2 GiB) | 12.23 |
| 40 GiB total standard persistent disks | 1.60 |
| One in-use external IPv4 on hub | 3.65 |
| Base total before tax, traffic and backups | 41.94 |
| Remaining allowance to $50 | 8.06 |

This is a small single-node pilot, not high availability. The $8.06 allowance
must cover measured traffic, backups, logs and applicable tax; it is not a
provider-enforced cap. At $50/month, 90 days consume roughly $150, leaving about
$150 credit for experiments. Do not upgrade to paid billing automatically.

OpenBao has no public IP. Use private connectivity in the same zone, with only
the trusted broker allowed to reach its TLS listener. Stage installation artifacts
through the operator rather than adding Cloud NAT. Access administration through
an authenticated tunnel. No Kubernetes, managed SQL, paid load balancer, GPU or
local transcription models are included. Initially run only owner-reviewed MCPs;
untrusted uploads require a separate worker security boundary and budget review.

Create alerts at $25, $40 and $45 and review daily usage during rollout. Alerts
alone do not stop spend. Cap worker replicas, disk growth, log retention and
traffic at application/infrastructure boundaries. Reassess paid hosting before
trial expiry; cross-provider placement is an option, not a prerequisite.

Sources:
- [Compute pricing](https://cloud.google.com/products/compute/pricing/general-purpose)
- [Disk pricing](https://cloud.google.com/products/block-storage)
- [IPv4 pricing](https://cloud.google.com/vpc/pricing)

Deployment update: the dedicated daedro-mcp-hub project now has one e2-small
secrets VM with a 24-hour provider STOP policy. VM creation and scheduling are
verified; OpenBao startup readiness is not yet verified. No hub VM exists yet.
The $50 gross-cost budget is active with thresholds at $25/$40/$45/$50.
For more headroom, the revised starting plan uses two e2-small hosts and up to
two outbound IPv4 addresses: approximately $33.36/month before variable charges.
See [rollout state](../deploy/gcp/README.md).