
Always Free Usage Limits - kiyanwang
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/always-free-usage-limits
======
ploggingdev
Since it's not mentioned in the linked page, it's worth mentioning that the
free trial in GCP is now $300 for 12 months [1]. Previously it was $300 for 60
days. IMO this is a major change since GCP is much better positioned to
attract developers just getting started who used to gravitate towards the AWS
free trial mainly because of the longer trial period of 12 months.

The new non expiring free tier in GCP (aka Always Free Usage Limits) also
offers a f1-micro instance while AWS does not offer a VM as part of their non
expiring free tier.

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

~~~
JorgeGT
> The new non expiring free tier in GCP (aka Always Free Usage Limits) also
> offers a f1-micro instance

However in order to do this you have to enable billing, unlike with the free
tier of App Engine. I'm always wary of these things because I fear I'll screw
up and run into a huge bill somehow. I currently have a pre-paid 1€/month VPS
with $european_competitor to prevent this.

~~~
ktta
1€/month?! What kind of performance are you getting? Is it usage for a web
server?

Would you mind sharing the VPS provider?

~~~
JorgeGT
I would say the performance is quite good for the price, I use it as a web
dashboard/alerting server with InfluxDB+Grafana and it is quite snappy when
browsing the graphs and so on. No problem sharing the provider, ArubaCloud, I
just didn't want to sound like an advert.

~~~
eriknstr
[https://www.arubacloud.com/vps/configurator-virtual-
private-...](https://www.arubacloud.com/vps/configurator-virtual-private-
server.aspx)

Well, well, well, turns out they offer FreeBSD 10. If it upgrades nicely to
FreeBSD 11 then I think they've earned themselves a customer and Vultr will
have lost one customer due to Vultr no longer giving best bang for the buck.
Moving to ArubaCloud would give me 1GB RAM + 20GB SSD instead of the 768MB RAM
+ 15GB SSD my current Vultr VPS has, and it'd do so at a lower price.
Meanwhile it seems also that the VPS configuration I have at Vultr for 5 USD
per month is no longer available for new VPSes, instead Vultr now has 512MB
RAM + 20GB SSD for 2.50 USD (which is about 2.35 EUR) per month and 1GB RAM +
25GB SSD for 5 USD (about 4.71 EUR) per month. And how much is ArubaCloud
charging for 1GB RAM + 20GB SSD? 1 EUR per month, it says!

But the ArubaCloud prices are excluding VAT, it says. Does that mean they will
bill me, who lives in Norway, slightly more than 1 EUR per month? Either way
it'll be cheaper than Vultr.

~~~
sterex
Wow. That's pretty good. But how viable is it for them?

~~~
Veratyr
They only operate in Europe where computing services are generally cheaper and
they seem to be running on processors that are a few years old. It's not
outdated old but there's a chance the servers are what remain after a more
premium product is upgraded.

Also there are no performance guarantees, no SAN for the SSDs (no redundancy
so much lower cost), limited bandwidth and a lower SLA.

I'd guess that since there are no performance guarantees, they're likely
overcommitting substantially.

------
shthed
I thought it was strange that the free network egress excluded Australia. I
can understand why they might charge more for China, but Australia?

Then I found this article (written 3 years ago):

[https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-
bandwidth-a...](https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-
around-the-world/)

Bandwidth to Australia cost 20x that of EU or US because of Telstra :(

Good news though, Google are planning a Compute Engine zone in Sydney this
year :)

~~~
Veratyr
I'm curious whether this'll change when the NBN is more prominent. Does anyone
know what their peering policy is/will be? I had a look around but couldn't
find anything.

------
atkbro
Mentioned in the thread that was on the front page yesterday: In European
Union the only available account type is Business
[https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602](https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602)
which means many users won't be able to take advantage of the offer ($300
trial or free tier usage).

I guess I'll just have to keep using AWS/Azure/$competitorX :(

~~~
tazjin
An easy fix to this is moving to Norway!

------
modeless
Wow, you can run an instance 24/7 for free, and there's no end to the free
period? That seems pretty great! Like having a free always-on Raspberry Pi in
the cloud.

~~~
ac29
The catch is you only get 1GB/month of free egress traffic, after which it is
12c/GB. Ingress is free. Depending on your use case, this is either a great
deal, or a terrible one.

------
djhworld
Has anyone from the UK/Europe been able to successfully sign up to GCP?

I can't seem to select "Individual" when I sign up, it permanently selects
"Business" and asks for a VAT number. I don't want to lie and get in trouble
with the tax authorities or whatever.

I only plan to use it for tinkering at home!

AWS doesn't do this, why Google?

~~~
dotdi
I signed up about a week ago from Germany and it worked fine. I didn't have to
provide any VAT number, but they wanted my CC number, stating that they won't
charge anything without my prior confirmation.

Today I got an email saying that my free trial was extended to 12 months.

~~~
djhworld
I'm presuming you already have plans in place to pay the VAT on any charges
you accrue though, it doesn't look like Google do this.

This is what worries me the most, plus Google stipulate that your usage of the
cloud platform _must_ be for economic benefit, not for personal use.

AWS don't seem to have this restriction and they will collect and pay VAT on
your behalf. Why doesn't Google? Is it some sort of tax dodge?

~~~
tcwc
Usually a seller doesn't add VAT to B2B invoices into the EU, VAT is accounted
for by the purchaser under the 'reverse charge' system. B2C is different, they
would need to charge the local VAT rate in each member state. I suspect they
simply haven't gotten around to supporting it yet.

------
koolba
Wait so does this last forever v.s. only the first year like AWS does?

If so, does that mean I can have a personal server running in the cloud, for
free, forever? There's a hell of a lot you can do with a tiny server these
days.

~~~
dsr_
Only if you can manage to send less than a gigabyte a month out to the
Internet.

~~~
koolba
With unlimited ingress there's plenty of use cases.

------
sapphire_tomb
For some probably very good reasons I can't figure out - you can't sign up for
the free trial as an individual from the UK - only as a business. So I guess I
won't be trying this.

~~~
Symbiote
Google doesn't charge VAT, they expect the customer to account for it. Only
businesses are allowed to pay VAT in this way.

I signed up pretending to be a business, but I assume the VAT on the $3/mth I
spend isn't worth anyone's time to account for. £0.20/year?

See
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/4g50uu/t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/UKPersonalFinance/comments/4g50uu/tax_google_cloud_vat_reporting/)

~~~
sapphire_tomb
Thanks for the link - that's a useful read.

So I signed up as indicated - but perhaps this free tier thing doesn't really
work for accounts outside the USA either - as when trying to fire up an
f1.micro instance it still says it's going to charge me (albeit out of the
$300 free credit), so maybe I misunderstood something about the article.

------
planetjones
What's the deal with getting SSL on your custom domain name now? I moved away
from app engine for small projects previously as I think they wanted $60 a
month for this.

I did look on the website but I couldn't find the information. I have to say
on a mobile device the GCP pages are very poor IMO. Too big a font, too much
spacing, intrusive sticky header and too many scrolling effects where content
magically appears or disappears. And even worse - when I click the pricing
calculator it doesn't fit on the iOS safari screen so it is unusable. It does
feel that some CSS and JS wizard got given far too much free reign.

~~~
micklinghoff
I set up SSL for my custom domain on App Engine with Let's Encrypt yesterday -
once you know how to do it, it takes only 5 minutes, I followed this tutorial:
[https://realguess.net/2016/09/26/installing-let-s-encrypt-
ss...](https://realguess.net/2016/09/26/installing-let-s-encrypt-ssl-
certificate-on-google-app-engine-using-certbot/)

------
joshgel
This is great. Lets you run a full time server for free. Display a hobby
website or a development site or whatever. Thats amazing! No one else offers
this "always", right?

~~~
mark_l_watson
IBM Bluemix has a very generous free tier, enough to run a few web apps for
free.

~~~
yupyupp
From my quick glance it looks like Bluemix is only a 30 day trial though. :/

~~~
mark_l_watson
Bluemix has a permanent free tier.

------
roryisok
Have these limits increased or decreased? What were they before?

~~~
X-Istence
It was a lot more limited before.

------
Perceptes
Tempting to run an Algo VPN on the free tier of GCE, but these days I'm trying
to use Google products _less_ rather than more.

------
WaxProlix
Has GCP found a way to integrate with Google Domains yet? I had to transfer a
domain that I'd bought on GD to Route53 because I couldn't figure out how to
get redirects with domain masking. Super frustrating, whereas the AWS
equivalent was just Route53 -> S3 bucket for my little static site.
$.53/month, not bad.

~~~
homero
There's cloud dns

------
hashkb
Dear Google: add managed Postgres and I'm leaving AWS for you.

~~~
bskap
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13831277](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13831277)

------
homero
That's cool, I can get .2 cores free. No one else offers this. Do we get an
ip? That can be expensive for Google.

~~~
petters
I just spun up a f1-micro instance. It got a public IPv4 and I was able to
reserve a static IP. I did not see that IPv4s would cost extra.

~~~
homero
Same I even made it static, their ephermal changes instantly. I love my little
.2 core vm!!

I don't know how they're going to give out 100k ips tho

------
option_greek
Their console is really slow. Go to any section (eg compute) and spinner will
be your best friend for a long time. What the heck are they doing in there
anyway. In comparison, AWS console loads much faster (anecdotal of course).

------
ionwake
Just remember guys when my startup hit the front page and I clicked on the pay
to upgrade from free to paid the system automatically took the whole site
offline for 24 hours.

Make sure they changed / fixed this before trusting GAE

If anyone could confirm this is still the case please say

Edit - is GAE usage == GCP ? If not I will remove this comment immediately
sorry

------
Omnipresent
In addition to making GCP cheaper and easier to try out than AWS, they need
developer advocates and available resources using which developers can switch
their apps from AWS to GCP. After being a leader in this space for a long
time, the main advantage AWS has is the perception of "how easy it is to use"

------
ubercow
I want to move some project I have running on AWS to Google Cloud Functions,
but they currently only have a hack for triggering them on a schedule.

From what I understand based on the docs, you have to run an AppEngine
instance just for the cron functionality.

------
joeyspn
So, the flexible GAE environment has _finally_ a free starter quota?

------
kyledrake
Is this the 3rd or 4th post about some random Google Cloud thing today? I'm
losing track.

No news here, just the usual business model of the "cloud": cheap in,
expensive out. They rope you in with a fee tier then charge you 9-18x more for
egress than you pay for it running your own hardware with IP transit (or going
with a VPS provider like Vultr that charges you the correct prices for it).

Have fun scaling your company economically, hope you don't need to send any
data to your customers.

~~~
qeternity
Ah the classic anti-cloud post that pretends to understand everyone's use
cases and economics. You realize that everyone knows how expensive this stuff
is. You realize that people plan and model growth around these figures. You
realize that despite all of this, many people still go with cloud solutions
because they get other benefits.

I mean ffs, I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and
said we were putting everything on Vultr. And fwiw, we're not cloud based for
the exact reasons you mention (some spot usage). It makes sense for our
business model, we have predictable computing growth needs, so we go bare
metal. But I understand why that doesn't make sense for other people.

~~~
kyledrake
> I would be laughed out of the room if I went to my investors and said we
> were putting everything on Vultr.

For reasons better analyzed by anthropologists than technologists, but all I
would really like is for HN to not be constantly bombarded with not-news GC
marketing spam _all day_.

~~~
qeternity
For reasons better analyzed by historians and statisticians. The historical
statistics are that Vultr is far more likely to be a risk to the business than
Google is. It's as simple as that.

~~~
kyledrake
Where is this evidence to substantiate this? We would love to read it, please
share it with us.

I'm not trying to sell anybody on anything, but let's just compare for a
moment. Vultr offers 10GbE for _all_ price tiers, access to actual networking
power tools like BGP sessions, access to 14 datacenter locations. They provide
a generous amount of bandwidth by default and only charge $0.01/GB (the actual
market rate) for anything after it. Unlike GC they have yet to "fat finger" a
routing table causing a global network outage, or trash an important metadata
server like AWS just did. CPU benchmarks routinely show them (and pretty much
everybody else) trouncing at least AWS for the same cost basis, by a lot.
Benchmarks have also, amazingly, shown some of the AWS instances losing out to
_mobile phone CPUs_.

Facts, benchmarks and a cost analysis suggest that they are at worst
competitive and likely far superior to GC/AWS offerings in pretty much every
way at the one thing that a "cloud" provider should be especially good at:
giving you solid, high performance VMs to run your infrastructure on.

I don't want to hear crap like "my investor read a marketing brochure
somewhere so we went with X". If my investor told me that, I would make sure
to inform him of the value of paying less money for a better thing, and how
knowing the difference can be a huge competitive advantage.

~~~
ctlaltdefeat
To be fair, there are some instances where GC has unique technological
advantages compared to VPSes. Their new distributed ACID SQL database comes to
mind.

~~~
misframer
Google Cloud also has live migration of VMs.

~~~
kyledrake
Is that unusual? I just did that with my VMs in the datacenter this morning to
add more storage...

------
homero
No cloud sql?

~~~
manigandham
Cloud SQL runs on Google Compute Engine nodes so it would be too high for the
limits (considering they only offer an f1-micro in this tier).

------
alberth
Off topic: does google.com run on GCP?

I ask because since 2010, Amazon.com has been running on AWS.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxk8b9rSKOo&t=7m32s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxk8b9rSKOo&t=7m32s)

(Around 7m30s into video)

~~~
packetslave
Cloud runs on the exact same underlying compute, storage, and network
infrastructure as search, gmail, and other Google services. The big google
services are not built on top of cloud themselves (e.g. not inside GCE VMs)
partially because they existed before cloud did. Some cloud services are also
public versions of existing internal Google services (cloud spanner, cloud
bigtable, etc)

Source: work at google, but on search, not cloud.

~~~
alberth
Are there plans for Google Services (search/gmail/etc) to move GCP anytime
soon?

I'm hesitate to use GCP, given that technically Google itself isn't using GCP
(totally understanding that a lift and shift of this size takes times, but it
would speak volumes if you can tout that Google itself is on GCP)

------
rdslw
Welcome to the USA, where marketing lies are everywhere and product owner
writing quoted below sentences does not find anything wrong with it.

Quoting the page: " _Always_ Free Usage Limits. Included products and usage
limits are subject to change."

Why they don't write a truth: " _Current_ Free Usage Limits, which are subject
to change." ?

This used to be fine print (which is still wrong). These days I call it
bullshit print.

~~~
dewey
That doesn't seem to be US specific...

~~~
jpttsn
An interesting twist in the evolving hivemind. Westerners generations ago
assumed the rest of the world were savage. Today's westerners assume that they
are the savages, and that the rest of the world is enlightened, free from
self-interest, kumbaya all the way. Lest we learn about the wider world, I
guess.

~~~
wingerlang
> Today's westerners assume that they are the savages, and that the rest of
> the world is enlightened, free from self-interest, kumbaya all the way.

That's a very broad statement which I think is not even remotely true.

~~~
saint_fiasco
It's pretty common. I know people from many Western countries who say "this
sort of bullshit only happens in my country, I'm so ashamed" when they are in
fact talking about near-universal human problems.

Then again, all my friends are Westerners, so it could be that they do this
sort of thing in the East too.

------
thesoonerdev
By far, the most common complaints I have heard when researching about GCP
online are the following: 1) You cannot use SQL in the same way other
platforms allow you 2) Only a subset of language features are supported for
Java and Python and it is a little hard to know when you will run into that
issue 3) As a combination of 1 and 2, it is not easy to migrate out of GCP and
this makes it a kind of vendor lock in.

While many people seem to agree that the platform itself works very well, if
you are developing on GCP, free credits or not, doesn't this mean you are
knowingly getting into a platform that will be hard to leave?

Can someone who has worked with GCP address if these concerns are still
ongoing? Also, are there some positives which are not easy to see from the
outside which might have helped you choose them/stick with them?

~~~
homero
That's for cloud platform, cloud compute gives you a real vm.

~~~
marksomnian
> That's for cloud platform

You mean App Engine?

~~~
thesoonerdev
So these limitations are only in Google App Engine? Is there a reason people
choose to use the App Engine then?

~~~
paragraft
Those limitations apply to the old model of App Engine they call the Standard
Environment, which abstracted much more over the underlying resources (you
didn't have to think about what VMs you were using).

At some point they realised that maintaining their own parallel forks of the
runtimes was a loser's game and now gently push you toward the "Flexible
Environment", which maps more transparently onto GCE (their equivalent to EC2)
instances (which is better for them since you're billed much more directly
according to your resource use), and has much more up to date runtimes, and
you can supply your own docker image if none of them fit.

The only people I know of who actively use the Standard Env anymore for new
projects are trying to have a hobby project run for free in the free tier.

