Access to the All of Us Researcher Workbench and data are free. The All of Us Research Program is making available $300 in credits to each registered researcher, however, expenses for Cloud resources used for research have to be paid for once those initial credits have been used.
The workbench uses Google Compute Engine (GCE) for computational resources in the cloud and Google Cloud Storage (GCS) for storage in the cloud. When users open a Jupyter Notebook for analysis, the notebook is loaded in a GCE Virtual machine, which is ephemeral. When users are actively working on notebooks, they will be spending at an hourly rate depending on the size of the machine. The default n1-highmem-4 machine costs around 20 cents per hour, including the cost for dataproc clusters. When notebooks are not in active use, the machines are “paused” to minimize cloud spend. In a “paused” state, there is still a nominal cloud spend which is typically under 10 cents a day. All GCE Virtual machines are shut down roughly every two weeks. Once the machines are shut down, no compute cost is incurred. A new GCE Virtual machine is spun up each time a user opens a new notebook in that workspace.
All workspaces have an associated “Workspace Bucket” for storage. Storage cost is $0.026 per GB per month. Workspaces also have Persistent Disk options which cost $0.04 per GB per month. Workspace storage is typically a very small fraction of the total cost unless users create and import very large files. Unlike compute costs, storage costs are incurred even when users are not actively using workspaces. It is good practice to remove large files that are no longer needed from the workspace bucket.
During the initial credit period, the workspace creator will be charged for all usage in the workspace - including usage from other collaborators in the workspace. If you do not want other collaborators to spend your initial credits, consider sharing your workspace with ‘read only’ permissions. Using the Cohort Builder, reviewing cohorts, or browsing support materials will not incur costs. For reference, please look at spending from projects done by the Consortium.