
Google Cloud Platform Free Tier - alexgaribay
https://cloud.google.com/free/
======
bibinou
The _Always Free_ requirements are Google help page copy in a nutshell :

    
    
      You are eligible for Always Free if you meet the following requirements:
    
      Not on a custom rate card
      Have an upgraded billing account
      Account must be in good standing
    

I know English is not my first language, but reading this, I feel like I know
what each word means but the words makes no sense in aggregate.

It doesn't seems like there is more information on the current page either.

Also I have no idea why the fact that you're providing servers for free
forever is not the first and most prominent paragraph, but is actually buried
in the middle of the doc page.

Except if it's just a terrible attempt at upsell?

~~~
nisa
You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before.

Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this time.
The free trial is for new customers only."

The specs:

Always Free Usage Limits

As part of ... Free Tier, Compute Engine offers an amount of usage that is
free to use, up to a specific limit. If you go over these usage limits and are
no longer in the free trial period, you will be charged according to the price
sheet.

1 f1-micro VM instance per month (US regions only).

\- f1-micro: 600MB memory, 0.2vCPU that can burst up to a full core.

30 GB of HDD persistent disk storage per month. 5 GB of snapshot storage per
month.

1 GB egress from North America to other destinations per month (excluding
Australia and China).

\- not sure what that means, you have to pay for traffic from Australia/China?
1TB is 119€ through.

[https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress](https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress)

For f1-micro instances, you receive free usage equivalent to the number of
total hours within the current month, enough to run one instance without
interruption for the entire month.

~~~
Ajedi32
> You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before.
> > > Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this
> time. The free trial is for new customers only."

That's just for the $300 free credit though, right? You can still use all the
"Always Free" services.

~~~
nisa
Not sure, I have a credit card there and 0€ balance, can't find the knob for
the free tier, when I create a f1-micro I'm billed. Maybe I have to put up
money?

~~~
Ajedi32
According to [the FAQ][1] it seems like you just use the instances like normal
and you won't be billed as long as you don't exceed the free usage limits...

[1]: [https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-
question...](https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-
questions#always-free)

~~~
nisa
let's try and see :) - thanks!

------
zedpm
Wow, this is a big deal. This is enough to run personal or PoC projects just
on the Always Free Tier, but the fact that you can stack the $300 credit on
top of the free tier is crazy:

> You are eligible for Always Free usage amounts during the free trial period.
> Always Free usage does not count against your free trial credits. For
> example, only the portion of your Google App Engine usage above the App
> Engine free daily usage limits is charged against your $300 credit. In
> addition, if your App Engine usage is below the free daily usage limits,
> your app will continue to run even after the free trial ends.

------
habosa
Disclaimer: I work at Google (on Firebase).

I knew about the free tier, but until I saw this page I had never really
thought about all the free tier offerings together.

We live in a really cool time to be programmers. 5 years ago most of the
services on that page were unimaginable to the average dev. Today they're not
only easy to deploy but free for lightweight usage. Makes me really excited to
build things over the next few years.

~~~
nunez
I agree. I can't wait to see what people do with Cloud OCR.

------
BenElgar
Finally! I've been making the point for years now that the reason new
developers start with AWS is because of their much more useful 12 month free
tier. People from GCP would come to our university every couple of years and
ask us "Why don't you use GCP?" and be told by countless computer science
undergraduates that they didn't NEED $300 for a couple of months, they needed
at least a year of time with a cheap instance or two. It seems they finally
listened.

------
jacobparker
This page is awesome. It's so much easier to read vs. AWS. The pie chart
explaining why they are cheaper is well-designed (the use of layering to group
the breakdown, numeric labels, aligning the important segment to 12 o'clock)
and effective (uncommon for pie charts.)

I've always appreciated how their time-limited free tier is based on dollars
rather than some proxy (e.g. how AWS limits which kind of things you can
use/sizes of things/quotas etc. for their time-limited free tier) and this
page helps clearly separate the "free trial" vs. "free quota" which AWS makes
a mess of in their documentation in my opinion.

Minor gripe/idea for the future:

I didn't realize (maybe it's new?) that you can get a free f1-micro. It's too
bad that the minimum container engine cluster size is 3 with f1-micros.. it'd
be cool to have a hosted/managed k8s cluster that was free by default until
you scaled up (with some effort (e.g. node pools to use larger instances/pre-
emptible instances when scaled) it could work very well for personal projects
that receive very little load/mostly receive load when I'm actively using
them.)

That's not to say that I don't appreciate what is free today or that I can't
afford a small personal K8S cluster :)

~~~
TripleA
The f1-micro is new: "New additions include Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub,
Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions, bringing the number of Always Free
products up to 15." [https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google-
Cloud-Pl...](https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google-Cloud-
Platform-your-Next-home-in-the-cloud.html)

------
christop
Unfortunately, you're still not allowed to use Google Cloud Platform for
personal usage if you're based in Europe.

Several years ago they emailed (presumably) everyone without a tax number in
their account, saying so:
[https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602](https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602)

Trying to add a billing account just now from a European country doesn't give
the choice of account type; it's fixed to "business" and can't be edited.

So without a billing account, it seems nobody in Europe can use the free tier
for personal use.

------
fpgaminer
To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a
lot of their services for a long time now. I assume there must be diffs here,
or else this is just a PR move to remind devs that GCP has free tiers.

I do want to express my gratitude to GCP for their free tiers. It has enabled
me to offer a various online tools to help some of my teacher friends. It
makes it easy to just throw together an app like I normally do, but not incur
the costs for these lightweight situations. The alternative is to spend my
time finding ways to run and manage the stuff for free using local servers or
something, which is usually more pain than the simple tools are worth.

The free tiers are also one of the reasons I tend to throw all my hobby
projects at GCP instead of AWS. GCP services also tend to be easier to use
than the equivalent AWS services. Mostly because GCP has a lot less to
customize. That's both good and bad, but for hobby projects it comes out net-
good.

AppEngine is also amazing, if your workload can fit within its limitations.
Again, for me it's about reducing hassle so I can focus on tinkering with
ideas and projects, which is what AppEngine lets me do.

All that good stuff said, I would _never_ recommend GCP for big projects,
companies, etc. The platform is rife with instabilities, bugs, backwards
incompatible changes, etc. This is from personal experience running a service
at a small company, and from my friend's experience running a huge service at
a large company.

EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently
use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's
no free tier on Cloud SQL. Without a free tier it's something like
$10-$20/month to run a managed SQL server. So I end up doing everything with
Datastore, which is their NoSQL offering. What a huge pain to munge all my
data patterns to fit within the limitations of NoSQL. I really wish there was
a similarly pay-as-you-go alternative but with real relational queries. Or,
you know, a free tier on Cloud SQL... :)

~~~
StevePerkins
Have they always given away a free GCE VM instance, though? This pretty much
eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for
personal tinkering (which in turn feeds Google more business if your personal
tinkering turns serious, or if you favor Google for professional work later
because that what you've grown used to).

There are a lot of other things on that page for which I've likewise never
heard of a free tier. But the raw VM instance one is what jumped off the page
at me.

~~~
ac29
> This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean
> droplet for personal tinkering

DO gives you 1TB of transfer for your $5, Google gives you 1GB for $0 and
12c/GB after that. Depending on how much egress traffic your VM generates, the
Google "free" tier could be very, very expensive.

------
punjabisingh

       Always Free* products to keep you going.
       *Subject to change
    

That's not quite what "always free" means, but I'll always take it _.

_ *Subject to change.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Logically, I agree with you. In practice, I believe that this is in fact
exactly what "always free" usually means.

------
therealmarv
Wow, looking at this numbers I think you can run small production ready things
with that.

~~~
azinman2
Ya no kidding. This free tier is actually pretty generous. I imagine they
found that these limits enables most people to start on GCE for free and only
start paying when things become real. I do wonder, however, how much that long
tail will cost them. 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example.

~~~
Ajedi32
> 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example

Are you sure? To me that sounds like it'll let you store 1 GB indefinitely, or
0.5 GB once a day for 12 hours; not 1 GB for a day on day 1, 2 GB for a day on
day 2, etc...

~~~
brightsize
"1GB indefinitely" is the case I think. The legacy GAE datastore allows you to
store 1G of data for free over the course of a month. Datastore I/O is charged
separately after free limits are exceeded. If I understand correctly the Cloud
Datastore _is_ the legacy GAE datastore with a different API (no NDB) and the
free tier for both is essentially the same.

------
mark_l_watson
I have used AppEngine for many years, and occasionally spin up very large
compute engine instances as needed.

Am I reading this correctly: even though I am an existing customer, I am still
eligible for the always free f1 micro instance, and other always free
services?

~~~
danielvf
Yes, it looks like this applies to existing, paying customers!

------
hnaparst
Yes, now I don't have to buy a reserved EC2 instance for my web site. This
will finally push me over to the Google ecosystem.

------
chpmrc
Do they finally accept prepaid cards? I chose AWS mainly because I don't have
a credit card.

~~~
rshm
Even with regular cards, in my case they wanted proof of address sent to them.

~~~
chpmrc
And I have just read you can link your bank account. Uh, no thanks.

------
atkbro
Great, the only account type available in Finland is "Business" so that's a
no-go for me.

Is there a reason why? Pretty much every other provider out there (amazon,
azure, ovh to name a few) have no problem giving out accounts to individual
users.

~~~
Schaulustiger
Yep, same problem trying to get the free tier here in Germany: I have to
create a business account. Well, no GCP for me. I hope they reconsider this
unfortunate restriction.

------
rayalez
Whoah, this is really cool! I've been looking to begin exploring and learning
GCP for awhile, and this is an excellent reason to get started! I'll deploy
something on there right away!

------
oddevan
So is the Compute Engine basically a VPS? If so, is it roughly equivalent to
the base-tier DigitalOcean offering? Sorry for the stupid question; it just
seems like I'm missing something!

~~~
jsolson
Thinking of it that way for single-node configurations (or static collections
of multiple nodes) makes sense, yes.

A lot of the promise of GCE and GCP generally come from on-demand scalability,
autoscaling, serverless, etc. Those become much more relevant as projects
scale from a small set of fairly static resource requirements to larger and
more dynamic usage. Take a hypothetical online retailer -- they might need few
hundred cores at night while their users are asleep, a few thousand during the
day, and tens of thousands on, say, black Friday. GCE lets you do that kind of
scaling as-needed rather than having to provision far in advance (although
there are pricing advantages if you can commit to cores and RAM over the long
term).

(note: I work on GCE)

~~~
Mithorium
so this free* f1-micro instance of GCE, with the most basic usage of say,
running a slack bot/nginx/random test projects, without the need for dynamic
scaling, would be functionally identical to a VM anywhere else? can I keep it
on 24/7? can I ssh to it, or do I need to use this cloud shell thing? can I
have one of every free tier thing or does free tier mean choose one from the
set

*subject to change

~~~
fp1989
You can do everything the same as a regular instance f1-micro. There is no
functional distinction. It is simply that you do not get charged for the
equivalent of 1-instance month worth of usage.

You can use the free tier of every product listed in conjunction with one
another. No need to pick and choose.

I work for GCP and was the lead for the Always Free launch.

~~~
Mithorium
I noticed that GCE instances only offer 1GB of network egress, and then
$0.12/GB thereafter, which seems rather steep. Is GCE only meant for use as a
CPU engine/internal node of some kind? Is there a different product meant for
edge servers that would handle external requests with outgoing traffic?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Is there a different product meant for edge servers that would handle
> external requests with outgoing traffic?

For some workloads, using Cloud CDN will save money, since cache egress is
$0.08/GB (to North America.)

------
nandhp
I'm confused by how they're presenting the "Always Free" tier of Google App
Engine. I've used the free tier of that for years and "instance hours" have
never been a thing that I'm aware of. I'm also wondering if the GAE free quota
will require a billing-enabled account now, as these other offers seem to
require, which would be disappointing.

~~~
clintonc
Instance hours come into play when, for example, you run multiple versions of
an app that get traffic, multiple instances for handling high load, or if you
have separate front- and back-end instances. A typical user only has one
instance going at a time, so no more than 24 instance-hours. (Instance hours
have been a thing for at least a couple of years.)

------
jaypaulynice
I was excited for a second, but nothing has changed from what was there
already...$300 credit that can be used within 12 months. Am I mistaken?

~~~
alexgaribay
The $300 previously only applied for 60 days.

~~~
jaypaulynice
Even a toy project will burn through this in less than 60 days...I was
expecting a free tier as in free up to 1GB or something like that...a little
misleading because the site makes it sound that.

~~~
jaegerpicker
That's exactly what the Always Free Tier is. 1 free micro instance with 30GB
storage for free always. The App Engine is 28 hours per month for free.

~~~
Ajedi32
It actually says 28 instance hours per day, not 28 instance hours per month.
So you can run one instance indefinitely, and still have 4 instance-hours left
over for testing or whatever.

~~~
jaegerpicker
Totally that was a typo

------
e28eta
I've never used GCP. Does anyone know at what granularity the Always Free
service limits apply? Is it per Google account, per credit card, per billing
name & address, something else?

Obviously they shouldn't be in the business of handing out unlimited f1-micros
(etc), but I'm curious how you'd go about having more than one small project.

------
jnsaff2
I noticed this morning (UTC) that my 40 something days of trial had turned
intp 300 something, but there had been no announcement and the docs were still
at 60 days.

I obviously attributed it to the extremely cool stuff I had been doing there
but apparently not:(

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londons_explore
Calling it "Always Free" suggests to me it will be free forever.

The little asterisk saying "subject to change anytime" quickly dispells this
myth.

Why choose such a misleading name? Why not just "Free tier"?

------
angryasian
I don't know this might be off topic , but what is the difference now between
google compute engine and google app engine flexible now.

~~~
njitram
That's explained here: [https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-
enviro...](https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-
environments#comparing_the_flexible_environment_to_compute_engine) Most
important difference; the app engine is fully managed by Google (so they do
security updates etc), with Compute Engine you have to do it yourself.

------
itp
Meta question, what did this article do to get driven off of the front page so
mercilessly? It's in free fall at this point!

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thejosh
Oh this page mentions the Australian location, guess we're getting closer to
the region finally launching :).

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Operyl
I was wondering how long until Google would try to one-up Amazon in this case.

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fisker
This is really confusing (perhaps deceptive).. after "upgrading" a billing
account it appeared to create a new account showing $300.00 remaining, but the
new account is closed and there is no way to open it, so no projects can be
linked to it..

------
lramaja
This is awesome. I can finally really get into machine learning. I was afraid
of the potential cost on aws + I can't afford a gpu. Game changer!

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wnevets
My free credits expired years ago :(

~~~
dragonwriter
But you are just as able as anyone else to use the free tier.

