Does stopping google cloud instance stop all charges?

When you stop your instance, you will not pay for CPU or GPU while the instance is stopped as the instance is not using them but you will be charged for resources attached as stated in the link you posted:

Your instances are not charged for per-second usage charges in TERMINATED state but any resources attached to the virtual machine will be charged until they are deleted, such as static IPs and persistent disks.

Google stops your instance by shutting it down, so you will lose data that is not in a persistent disk already.

From their docs:

When you shut down or delete an instance, Compute Engine sends the ACPI Power Off signal to the instance and waits a short period of time for your instance to shut down cleanly. If your instance is still running after this grace period, Compute Engine forcefully terminates it even if your shutdown script is still running.

There is a gcloud command that is in alpha that can suspend your VM: gcloud alpha compute instances suspend, you can read more in the docs here. It will only work on instances not using GPU or CSEK or preemptible VMs.


Compute Engine documentation says:

A stopped instance does not incur charges, but all of the resources that are attached to the instance continue to incur charges. For example, you are charged for persistent disks and external IP addresses according to the price sheet, even if an instance is stopped. To stop being charged for attached resources, you can reconfigure a stopped instance to not use those resources, and then delete the resources.