Why is GCP cloud scheduler so expensive

Question

I am having a look at GCP cloud scheduler for running a cloud function which collects and stores some data for my research project. I was looking at running the function every hour for 6 months. However after assessing the pricing this would come to about $440 (24 * 183 * 0.1). This seems quite expensive for quite a simple operation and the cost would only increase if I wanted it to run at my desired rate of every 20 minutes.

Is this the correct usage of cloud scheduler? Wouldn't it be cheaper to fire up a f1-micro instance and have that cron task to fire the function? Is there something special about it that I would lose doing it this way? Especially as IBM cloud functions have free cron

Answer 1

The actual running of a job is called an execution. A job is not billed for individual executions. For instance if a single job is defined to run every day of the month then the job is billed $01/month and not $3/month for 30 executions of that single job. if you have 1  job running every day for 6 months you will be charged $0.6/month.

The pricing is based per account and not per project.