How do I share objects on GCS without being billed for downloads?

Question

When objects are uploaded into a GCS bucket and shared publicly, the owner of the bucket is responsible for all of the costs of users downloading these objects. How do I change that so that the downloaders are billed instead of me?

Answer 1

This feature is called "Requester Pays." Its documentation is here: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/requester-pays

The idea is that you mark a bucket as being a "requester pays" bucket. Once you've done that, your project is only responsible for the price of storing the objects in the bucket (and, if it's a nearline or coldline bucket, any early deletion fees). Anyone that wants to download an object from this bucket (or upload a new object, copy an object, etc) must specify which of their projects GCS should bill for the operation.

This is a very useful configuration for situations where you wish to make objects publicly available but don't want to be responsible for the cost of distributing it to many end users.

To enable Requester Pays on a bucket, open the Cloud Storage browser, find your bucket, and click the "off" button in the "Requester Pays" column, and follow the prompts. You can also set this flag in other ways, see the docs: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/using-requester-pays#enable

Downloading objects from requester pays buckets requires a Google Cloud project with billing enabled. Once you have that, you can download the object from the cloud console or using gsutil:

$> gsutil -u [PROJECT_ID] cp gs://[BUCKET_NAME]/[OBJECT_NAME] [OBJECT_DESTINATION]

The trick to this command is the -u [PROJECT_ID] bit, which specifies which project should be billed for the download.

You can also download the object using our other APIs or with the cloud console. More in the docs: https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/using-requester-pays#using