Billing Projects

About Billing Accounts

Most costs for operating the Single Cell Portal are paid for by the portal project itself, free to our users. Some activities (like running workflows) do accrue costs to users. These require a google billing account before getting access to the functionality.

All costs charged to billing accounts are charged through Google, can be monitored through the Google Console, and are charged from Google and not the Portal.

When you add a study to a billing account, your billing account will be charged for storage of files and any computes you personally run directly from Google. Operations of the portal are not billed to user billing accounts.

Obtain a Google Billing Account

This process will differ per institute. Learn more here, in section 1. Please add the billing object through the portal and not FireCloud (instructions below).

Add a Google Billing Account to the Single Cell Portal

Please note this process creates a Firecloud billing project which the Single Cell Portal will use. Both systems will be set-up with your billing.

Use and Administration

Now that you have a billing project, you can use it when you create a study. It will be available to you to select to if you want to create a study that requires computes. You can add people to your billing object and enable their ability to run computes through "My Billing Projects". Please note the Single Cell Portal is not responsible for costs accrued by the use of billing projects; please only add users to your project that will be responsible with the use of the billing project.