A flat monthly bill, not a usage meter that never stops ticking
Google Cloud Run is a superb serverless engine for bursty, stateless containers, and it tends to bill you for the requests you serve, the CPU and memory you use, and the traffic that leaves. Ruust takes the opposite bet: a flat price per Egg per month in GBP, unmetered egress on every tier, and Eggs kept warm around the clock. If your app is always on, you should not pay as though it were a spike.
Flat price per Egg, in GBP · unmetered egress · no cold starts
Here is how Ruust and Google Cloud Run line up on the things that decide your monthly invoice: how you are charged, what egress costs, whether your app sleeps, and how much of the platform you have to learn before you ship.
| Ruust | Google Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Flat GBP per Egg per month. Nano £3, Small £6, Standard £12, Large £24, or a custom slider. | Usage-based: tends to bill for requests, CPU and memory in fine-grained increments, priced in USD. |
| Egress | Unmetered on every tier. No egress bill, ever. Fair-use rate caps only, no volume metering. | Tends to meter bandwidth beyond an allowance, typically priced per gigabyte and by destination. |
| Cold starts | None. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7, so there is no spin-up lag on the first request. | Tends to scale to zero when idle, so an idle service usually cold starts on the next request. |
| Predictability | You know the exact bill before you deploy. Same price in every region. | Cost follows traffic, so a busy month or a runaway loop can move the invoice. |
| Databases | Managed Postgres and Redis database Eggs with a persistent volume, private to your Coop. | Powerful managed data services (Cloud SQL, Memorystore and more), configured separately. |
| Learning curve | Connect a repo, pick a region and size, live on HTTPS in about two minutes. | Deep and capable, but the wider platform (IAM, projects, quotas) tends to take time to learn. |
| Scaling ceiling | Horizontal replicas across two live regions today, London and Virginia, more coming. | Global reach, near-limitless autoscaling and a very large regional footprint. |
| Own hardware | BYOH: run the open-source Apache-2.0 agent on your Linux boxes, £2 per Egg, capped £20 per host. | GKE and its fleet tooling can span your own infrastructure, though the model is heavier to run. |
Google Cloud details are as we understand them and can change. Always check Google Cloud's current pricing and features for the latest.
What you get by switching.
Your bill is a number, not a nail-biter
Ruust charges a flat GBP price per Egg per month, the same in every region, with no seat or plan fee to start. Cloud Run's usage-based model is efficient for spiky work, but for an always-on service it tends to turn a steady workload into a moving invoice. With Ruust you can read the price off the slider before you deploy.
Unmetered egress kills the surprise bill
Every Ruust tier ships with unmetered egress, so serving traffic, images or an API never generates a per-gigabyte charge. Hyperscalers usually meter bandwidth beyond an allowance and price it by destination, which is exactly the line item that tends to surprise people at the end of the month. On Ruust there is no egress bill at all.
Always-on means no cold starts
Ruust keeps every Egg warm 24 hours a day, so there is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag on that first request. Scaling to zero saves money on idle serverless workloads, but it trades latency for it. If your app needs to answer instantly whenever someone knocks, warm beats cheap-when-idle.
Live in two minutes, not two afternoons
Connect a git repo (Nixpacks autobuild or your own Dockerfile), choose a region and size, and you are on HTTPS in about two minutes, with TLS issued in around 90 seconds and renewed automatically. GCP is enormously capable, but you tend to meet projects, IAM and quotas before you ship. Ruust keeps the path from repo to running Egg short.
Where Google Cloud is the better fit.
Unmatched scale and breadth
Google Cloud is a genuine hyperscaler. If you need to burst to enormous, global traffic, or you want dozens of managed services (data warehousing, ML, pub/sub, a huge regional footprint) under one roof, GCP operates at a scale and depth Ruust does not attempt. For that class of problem it is often the right call.
Serverless economics for bursty work
For stateless containers with spiky or unpredictable traffic, Cloud Run's scale-to-zero and per-use billing can be very cost-effective. If your service sits idle much of the day and then spikes hard, paying only for what you use, and nothing when idle, is a real advantage that flat pricing cannot beat.
A mature, integrated ecosystem
GCP's tooling, identity model, observability and integrations with the rest of Google's stack are deep and battle-tested. Teams already invested in BigQuery, Firebase or Google's data and ML services will find Cloud Run slots neatly alongside them, which is a pull Ruust does not try to match.
Ruust vs Google Cloud, the common questions.
Is Ruust cheaper than Google Cloud Run?
It depends on your traffic shape. For an always-on app that serves steady traffic and real egress, Ruust's flat GBP price per Egg with unmetered egress is usually easier to predict and often cheaper, because there is no per-request or per-gigabyte meter. For workloads that sit idle most of the day and spike occasionally, Cloud Run's scale-to-zero billing can win. Ruust removes the two lines that tend to surprise people: usage-based compute and metered egress.
Does Ruust have cold starts like a serverless platform?
No. Every Egg is kept warm 24/7, so there is no scale-to-zero and no spin-up lag on the first request. Cloud Run usually spins idle services down and cold starts them again on the next request, which trades latency for idle savings. If your app must respond instantly whenever it is hit, Ruust's always-on model avoids that trade entirely.
What does egress cost on Ruust?
Nothing. Egress is unmetered on every tier, so there is no per-gigabyte charge no matter how much traffic you serve. There are per-Egg fair-use rate caps to stop abuse, but there is no metering or cap on egress volume, and no egress line on your bill. Hyperscalers such as Google Cloud tend to meter bandwidth beyond an allowance and price it by destination.
Can I run databases and connect services privately on Ruust?
Yes. Ruust offers managed Postgres and Redis database Eggs with a persistent volume, kept private to your project (a Coop), and you can also connect any external Postgres or MySQL by connection string. Eggs in a Coop reach each other privately by hostname, deny-by-default with explicit peering. You also get custom domains with automatic TLS, health checks and zero-downtime rolling deploys.