Tolgee on Google Cloud Run

Tolgee is an open-source, developer-friendly localization (i18n) and translation management platform built on Spring Boot. This module deploys Tolgee on Cloud Run v2 on top of the App_CloudRun foundation, which provisions and manages the shared Google Cloud infrastructure.

This guide focuses on the cloud services Tolgee uses and how to explore and operate them from the Google Cloud Console and the command line. For the mechanics common to every Cloud Run application — service identity, ingress and load balancing, scaling and concurrency, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC Service Controls, backups, and the deployment lifecycle — refer to the App_CloudRun foundation guide rather than repeating them here.

---

What Tolgee costs on RAD, and how that compares

Tolgee on RAD's Cloud Run module costs about US$180.87 a month in a Google Cloud project you own, with a one-time 175-credit module fee (US$17.50, or 157.5 credits in a RAD-managed project, 10% lower). This configuration keeps the service running continuously rather than scaling to zero. GKE Autopilot is the lower-cost option; see the GKE guide, at about US$149.81 a month for the same module fee. If you only need Tolgee occasionally — a translation push ahead of a release, an evaluation before adopting it — a RAD-managed project can be deleted and restored within 30 days for a handful of credits (under US$1) instead of paying for it to sit idle. See Pause it for free, below. Figures are as at 8 October 2026; sources are listed at the end of this section.

What you pay on RAD

	In a Google Cloud project you own	In a project RAD manages for you
Module fee, once per deployment	175 credits (US$17.50 at the top-up price)	157.5 credits (10% lower)
Build time	About 3-6 credits per build	The same
Google Cloud running cost	Billed by Google to your own billing account, about US$180.87 a month for the default configuration (table below)	Metered hourly in credits; RAD publishes 83 credits a day, about 2,490 a month
Who owns what	You own the project and its billing; RAD deploys and updates it	RAD owns the project, with guardrails, quotas and budget alerts; you get console access, and a minimum purchased balance is held in reserve

10 credits cost US$1 on a one-off top-up, and less on a monthly plan. In a project RAD manages, the database, file server and network are shared by every application in the project, so a second application does not add a second set of them.

Default running cost in your own project (us-central1, Google list prices):

Resource (module default)	Per month
Cloud Run, 2x vCPU / 4 GiB (alwaysOn)	US$110.42
Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL, 1 vCPU / 3.75 GB, zonal, 10 GB SSD	US$51.02
NFS/cache file server (small VM)	US$13.43
Cloud NAT and networking	US$5.00
Cloud Storage (add-ons, backups)	US$1.00
Total	US$180.87

How it compares

• Tolgee's own hosted plan, Tolgee Cloud, starts with a free tier (30,000 words, 3 seats), then Translate at €58/month (about US$63), Optimise at €133/month (about US$144), and Manage at €373/month (about US$403), all billed annually (source: tolgee.io/pricing). RAD's own-project figure sits between Tolgee Cloud's Translate and Optimise tiers, but it buys a dedicated instance with its own database and file server rather than a shared, seat-limited one.
• A self-managed comparison: Hetzner CPX22 (2 vCPU/4GB) runs about $24/month, a DigitalOcean 2 vCPU/4GB Droplet is the same $24/month, and a GCP Compute Engine e2-standard-2 (2 vCPU/8GB) is about $49/month — all cheaper in cash terms, but running an always-on i18n platform with its own database and file server yourself means patching, backups and TLS by hand.
• Tolgee's continuous-availability default is what makes this guide's running cost higher than many other modules on RAD — translation workflows are typically checked throughout the working day rather than opened occasionally, so it is configured not to scale to zero.

Pause it for free: delete a RAD-managed project, restore it when you need it

If Tolgee runs in a project RAD manages for you, deleting the whole project unlinks its billing first, then asks Google to delete the project outright — Google's own 30-day recoverable soft delete. Unlike deleting one module, this does not tear down Cloud SQL, the NFS VM or the compute resource one by one: the whole project simply stops, and nothing is charged while it waits, because billing is already unlinked.

Restoring, within 30 days and only by the project's owner, asks Google to undelete the project and reattaches its billing account, then asks you to run Update on each deployment to confirm everything came back. Because nothing was individually destroyed, that Update finds the same resources already there — it is a check, not a rebuild, and an Update never charges the module fee again. This costs only a handful of credits (under US$1) in total for a typical 2-3-deployment chain.

What this needs: you must own the project (not one RAD only manages billing for), you must restore it yourself within 30 days — after that Google deletes it for good — and restoring is admitted like creating a new project, so your purchased credit balance must still clear the tier's floor (100 credits for the sandbox tier most study/demo use fits). Google says most services are fully working again within 36 hours of a restore.

One real gap: nightly backups are written to a bucket inside the project, and that bucket has Cloud Storage's soft-delete explicitly turned off, so it is very likely gone as soon as you delete the project — even though the project itself is recoverable for 30 days. If you have translation keys and history you want to keep, copy a backup out (to Google Drive, or a bucket outside the project) before deleting. For a default install with nothing irreplaceable in it, this does not matter.

Pay only while you use it, the other way: delete and redeploy

In your own project, or once the 30-day restore window has passed, the alternative is to delete Tolgee outright and redeploy it later. A redeploy costs the module fee again, plus the builds — roughly 180 credits (about US$18) in your own project, or 162.5 credits in a RAD-managed one.

Deleting saves money only once Tolgee would otherwise sit unused long enough to clear that redeploy cost against its own daily running cost — against the own-project total above (about US$6.03 a day), that works out to about 3 days or more, or about 2 days or more in a RAD-managed one (83 credits a day). Most of the running cost here is the always-on Cloud Run instance plus the database and NFS file server; they stop only when nothing else in the project uses them, so deleting Tolgee while something else shares the project saves only this app's own compute part.

Keep data first: nightly backups go to a bucket inside the deployment and are deleted with it, so copy the latest backup out before deleting if you want to keep it.

Lab sessions and Managed Environments

• Lab sessions, for training: a trainer runs a session for a class. Each participant gets the app in their own Google Cloud project for 15 minutes to 24 hours, within an allowance the trainer sets. Either the trainer funds every place, or each participant pays for their own. Everything is deleted when the session ends and unused credits go back to the trainer.
• Managed Environments, for consultancies: a partner runs the app for a client from a ring-fenced wallet it funds, and settles with the client directly. If the wallet runs low, billing pauses and the data is kept, so nobody receives an unexpected charge. At the end the partner hands the project over and the deployments become the client's own.
• Credits can be bought in more than 20 currencies, including XAF, XOF, NGN, GHS, KES and ZAR, by card, bank transfer or mobile money.

Sources (8 October 2026): Google Cloud Billing Catalog API list prices; radmodules.dev/pricing for RAD's own fees and daily-credit estimates; Delete and restore projects for the pause/restore mechanics; tolgee.io/pricing for Tolgee Cloud's hosted plans.

1. Overview

Tolgee runs as a Java / Spring Boot container on Cloud Run v2. The deployment wires together a focused set of Google Cloud services:

Capability	Google Cloud service	Notes
Compute	Cloud Run v2	Spring Boot service, 2 vCPU / 4 GiB by default, serverless autoscaling
Database	Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15	Required — Tolgee does not support MySQL or other engines
Object storage	Cloud Storage	A bucket for optional file storage (screenshots/imports)
Secrets	Secret Manager	Auto-generated initial admin password and JWT signing secret; database password
Ingress	Cloud Run URL / Cloud Load Balancing	Default run.app URL; optional external HTTPS load balancer + custom domain

Sensible defaults worth knowing up front:

• PostgreSQL 15 is mandatory. The database engine is fixed by the shared application layer; selecting any other engine breaks startup.
• Tolgee connects to Cloud SQL over TCP, not a Unix socket. Its bundled PostgreSQL JDBC driver cannot use a socket, so on Cloud Run the entrypoint connects over the Cloud SQL private IP with sslmode=require. That is why enable_cloudsql_volume defaults to false here (no Auth Proxy socket sidecar).
• The JWT secret is generated automatically and stored in Secret Manager. It must never be rotated after first boot without a maintenance window — rotating it immediately invalidates all active user sessions.
• SERVER_PORT, not PORT. Tolgee reads SERVER_PORT = 8080; Cloud Run reserves PORT, so the module sets SERVER_PORT explicitly.
• min_instance_count defaults to 1 and cpu_always_allocated to true. Tolgee runs asynchronous batch operations (bulk machine-translation, imports, deletions) in in-process background threads after the triggering request returns; request-based billing would throttle them to ~0 CPU. Flip both (false + min = 0) only for a purely interactive, cost-first deployment that runs no large batch jobs.
• No Redis. Tolgee stores all translation state in PostgreSQL; enable_redis defaults to false.
• Schema is created by Liquibase on first boot. There is no separate migration job — the foundation creates the role/database and Tolgee auto-migrates on start.

---

2. Google Cloud Services & How to Explore Them

All commands assume PROJECT and REGION are set. Service and resource names are reported in the deployment Outputs.

A. Cloud Run — the Tolgee service

Tolgee runs as a Cloud Run v2 service that autoscales by request load between the minimum and maximum instance counts. Each deployment creates an immutable revision; traffic can be split across revisions for safe rollouts.

• Console: Cloud Run → select the service for revisions, traffic, logs, and metrics.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services list --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run services describe <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"
  gcloud run revisions list --service <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION"

See App_CloudRun for scaling, concurrency, execution environment, and traffic splitting.

B. Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15

Tolgee stores all application data (projects, languages, keys, translations, users) in a managed Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL 15 instance. The service connects over the Cloud SQL private IP (TCP, sslmode=require) rather than a Unix socket, because Tolgee's JDBC driver cannot use a socket. On first deploy the foundation's create-db-and-user.sh step creates the database and role; Tolgee then runs its own Liquibase migrations on boot.

• Console: SQL → select the instance for connections, backups, flags, metrics.
• CLI:

  gcloud sql instances list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql instances describe <instance-name> --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud sql connect <instance-name> --user=<db-user> --database=<db-name> --project "$PROJECT"

The instance name, database, user, and password secret are in the Outputs. See App_CloudRun for the connection model, backups, and password rotation.

C. Cloud Storage

A Cloud Storage bucket (name_suffix = "storage") is provisioned for optional file storage — Tolgee keeps translations in PostgreSQL, so this bucket holds only uploaded screenshots or import artifacts if you mount it via gcs_volumes or configure Tolgee's S3-compatible file storage.

• Console: Cloud Storage → Buckets.
• CLI:

  gcloud storage buckets list --project "$PROJECT"
  gcloud storage ls gs://<bucket>/            # bucket name is in the Outputs

See App_CloudRun for GCS Fuse and CMEK options.

D. Secret Manager

Two secrets are generated automatically and stored in Secret Manager: the initial admin password (TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_INITIAL_PASSWORD) used to log in for the first time, and the JWT signing secret (TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_JWT_SECRET) used to sign all user session tokens. The database password is managed separately by the foundation.

• Console: Security → Secret Manager.
• CLI:

  gcloud secrets list --project "$PROJECT" --filter="name~admin-password OR name~jwt-secret"
  gcloud secrets versions access latest --secret=<secret-name> --project "$PROJECT"

See App_CloudRun for injection and rotation details.

E. Networking & ingress

The service is reachable at its run.app URL by default (ingress_settings = "all"). An external HTTPS load balancer with a custom domain, Cloud CDN, and Cloud Armor can be layered on; ingress settings and VPC egress control connectivity. Because Tolgee connects to Cloud SQL over the private IP, the service requires VPC egress (provided by the foundation).

• Console: Cloud Run (service URL); Network services → Load balancing.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services describe <service-name> --region "$REGION" --format='value(status.url)'
  gcloud compute addresses list --project "$PROJECT"

See App_CloudRun.

F. Cloud Logging & Monitoring

Container logs flow to Cloud Logging; Cloud Run and Cloud SQL metrics flow to Cloud Monitoring, with optional uptime checks and alert policies. The /actuator/health endpoint is used for the provisioned uptime check when the service is publicly reachable.

• Console: Logging → Logs Explorer; Monitoring → Dashboards / Alerting.
• CLI:

  gcloud run services logs read <service-name> --project "$PROJECT" --region "$REGION" --limit 50

---

3. Tolgee Application Behaviour

• First-deploy database setup. No dedicated init job runs — the App_CloudRun foundation's create-db-and-user.sh step creates the PostgreSQL role and database and grants schema ownership. Tolgee then creates and migrates its entire schema with Liquibase automatically on first boot.
• Migrations on start. Tolgee applies its Liquibase changesets on every startup, so upgrading the application_version applies schema changes without a separate step.
• The JWT secret is immutable after first boot. It is generated once and written to Secret Manager and kept stable across restarts and instances. Rotating TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_JWT_SECRET immediately invalidates all active user sessions — only rotate during a planned maintenance window.
• First-run login. After deploy, sign in as the initial owner: TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_INITIAL_USERNAME (default admin@techequity.cloud) with the generated password from Secret Manager. Change the password and configure additional auth providers (Google/OAuth2/SSO) from the Tolgee UI before going live.
• Health path. The readiness/startup/liveness probes target /actuator/health, which returns an unauthenticated 200 only after Liquibase migrations complete. Allow several minutes on first boot (60-second initial delay plus a wide failure window) — Spring Boot + first-run migrations start more slowly than a typical Node app.
• Batch operations run in the background. Bulk machine-translation, imports, and deletions execute asynchronously in in-process threads after the request returns, which is why cpu_always_allocated = true and min_instance_count = 1 are the defaults.
• Inspect the running revision's DB wiring:

  gcloud run services describe <service-name> --region "$REGION" --project "$PROJECT" \
    --format='value(spec.template.spec.containers[0].env)'

---

4. Configuration Variables

Variables are grouped exactly as they appear on the deployment platform. Only settings specific to or notable for Tolgee are listed; every other input is inherited from App_CloudRun with its standard behaviour.

Group 3 — Application Identity

Variable	Default	Description
application_name	tolgee	Base name for the Cloud Run service and secrets. Do not change after first deploy.
application_version	latest	Tolgee image tag used as FROM tolgee/tolgee:<tag> for the thin custom wrapper build. Pin to a release (e.g. v3.130.4) in production.

Group 4 — Runtime & Scaling

Variable	Default	Description
deploy_application	true	Set false to provision infrastructure only.
cpu_limit	2000m	CPU per instance; 2 vCPU recommended.
memory_limit	4Gi	Memory per instance. Tolgee requires at least 2 GiB for reliable operation.
min_instance_count	1	Keeps async batch operations processing between requests. 0 (scale-to-zero) is safe for purely interactive use.
max_instance_count	5	Cost ceiling. Must be ≥ min_instance_count.
cpu_always_allocated	true	Keeps CPU allocated so in-process batch jobs complete. Flip to false (+ min = 0) for interactive-only, cost-first deployments.
container_port	8080	Tolgee's Spring Boot SERVER_PORT.
container_image_source	custom	Builds the thin wrapper via Cloud Build.
enable_cloudsql_volume	false	Defaulted false — Tolgee's JDBC driver cannot use a Cloud SQL socket, so it connects over the private IP (TCP, sslmode=require).

Group 5 — Access & Ingress Control

Variable	Default	Description
ingress_settings	all	Allows public access to the Tolgee UI/API. Restrict or front with IAP for private deployments.

Group 11 — Storage & Filesystem

Variable	Default	Description
enable_nfs	true	Provisions Cloud Filestore NFS for optional Tolgee attachment storage.
gcs_volumes	[]	GCS Fuse volume mounts for the optional file-storage bucket.

Group 12 — Database Backend

Variable	Default	Description
db_name	tolgee	PostgreSQL database name. Immutable after first deploy.
db_user	tolgee	Application database user. Password auto-generated in Secret Manager.

Group 21 — Redis Cache & Queue

Variable	Default	Description
enable_redis	false	Leave off — Tolgee stores all state in PostgreSQL and does not require Redis.

All other inputs follow standard App_CloudRun behaviour.

---

5. Outputs

Returned on a successful deployment — the quickest way to locate and explore the running resources.

Output	Description
service_name	Cloud Run service name.
service_url	Default run.app URL of the service.
service_location	Region the service runs in.
stage_services	Stage-specific service URLs (Cloud Deploy).
load_balancer_ip / load_balancer_url	External HTTPS load balancer IP / URL (when enabled).
database_instance_name	Cloud SQL instance name.
database_name / database_user	Application database name / user.
database_password_secret	Secret Manager secret holding the DB password.
database_host / database_port	DB endpoint / port.
storage_buckets	Created Cloud Storage buckets.
network_name / network_exists / regions	VPC network, presence, regions.
container_image / container_registry	Deployed image and Artifact Registry repo.
monitoring_enabled / monitoring_notification_channels / uptime_check_names	Monitoring status, channels, uptime checks.
initialization_jobs	Names of any setup jobs.
deployment_id / tenant_id / resource_prefix	Naming identifiers.
project_id / project_number	Project identifiers.
cicd_enabled / github_repository_url / github_repository_owner / github_repository_name / cicd_configuration	CI/CD status and details.
artifact_registry_repository / cloudbuild_trigger_name / cloudbuild_trigger_id	Registry and build trigger.
vpc_sc_enabled / vpc_sc_perimeter_name / vpc_sc_dry_run_mode	VPC-SC status.
audit_logging_enabled / artifact_registry_cmek_enabled	Audit logging and CMEK status.

---

6. Configuration Pitfalls & Sensible Defaults

Risk: Critical (data loss / outage / security) — High (service degraded) — Medium (cost or partial degradation) — Low (minor).

Inherited plan-time validation. This module passes its configuration through the App_CloudRun foundation engine, which validates values and combinations at plan time — an out-of-range redis_port/backup_retention_days, IAP with no authorized identities, a gen1 runtime with NFS/GCS mounts, a database_type that does not match an enabled extension. Invalid configuration fails the plan with a clear, named error before any resource is created, so most mistakes below are caught up front rather than at apply or runtime.

Setting	Sensible value	Risk	Consequence if wrong
TOLGEE_AUTHENTICATION_JWT_SECRET (auto-generated)	Only rotate in a maintenance window	Critical	Rotating it invalidates all active user sessions, forcing immediate re-login for everyone.
db_name / db_user	Set once	Critical	Immutable after first deploy; renaming recreates the DB/user and destroys all data.
enable_cloudsql_volume	false	Critical	Tolgee's JDBC driver cannot use a Cloud SQL socket; enabling it points DB_HOST at a socket dir and breaks the database connection.
memory_limit	4Gi (≥ 2 GiB)	High	Below ~2 GiB the Spring Boot JVM OOMs during first-boot Liquibase migrations.
application_version	Pin in production	High	latest can pull a new major with incompatible migrations on redeploy.
enable_redis	false	Medium	Redis is unused; enabling it adds cost without benefit.
cpu_always_allocated / min_instance_count	true / 1	Medium	Flipping to request-based + scale-to-zero throttles async batch jobs (bulk MT/imports) to ~0 CPU and stalls them.
startup_probe (/actuator/health)	Keep the wide first-boot window	Medium	Too tight a window fails the revision while Liquibase migrations are still running on a fresh DB.
ingress_settings	all (or IAP)	Medium	Leaving public without auth exposes the Tolgee UI/API; the initial admin password must be changed immediately.

---

For the foundation behaviour referenced throughout — service identity, scaling and concurrency, ingress and load balancing, CI/CD, Cloud Armor, IAP, Binary Authorization, VPC-SC, backups, and image mirroring — see App_CloudRun. Tolgee-specific application configuration shared with the GKE variant is described in Tolgee_Common.

Related guides

• Hands-on lab: Tolgee on Cloud Run — deploy it step by step, with the console screens and commands at each stage.
• Tolgee on GKE Autopilot — the same application on Kubernetes, for when you need the other deployment target.
• Tolgee Common — Shared Application Configuration — the configuration shared by both deployment targets.
• Deployed alongside Unleash on Google Cloud Run, GlitchTip on Google Cloud Run, Formbricks on Google Cloud Run in the Release Management & Quality solution.