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
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?
2. According to the FAQ, this is basically a paid account (as opposed to a free trial) with automatic billing for charges above what the free tier offers.
3. This means you have to pay your bills. E.g. if you have overdue bills, your account isn't in good standing.
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
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.
That's just for the $300 free credit though, right? You can still use all the "Always Free" services.
$190 :) egress rates are per GB.
I wonder if there's an easy way to disable traffic coming from those regions.
No, if you've used a trial you won't get another trial, but that doesn't affect your eligibility for the free tier.
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... :)
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.
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.
This was my first thought. I'm currently trying to encourage our developers to start thinking cloud-first, and hosted SQL is integral for a lot. The absence of some tiny hosted SQL means that you can't build learning projects on GCP free tier in the same design that you'd use for commercial projects.
Alternately, for the first year you also get $300 credit which could cover Cloud SQL if you really need that.
https://cloud.google.com/free/
"Use these products for free up to the specified usage limits during and past the free trial. These usage limits do not expire, but are subject to change."
Includes gratis usage of App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Datastore, Cloud Storage, Container Engine, and much much more.
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)
*subject to change
It's a dynamically scalable IaaS. You can treat it like a VPS (and that may be in some cases be cost effective for certain loads as one between the free quota and sustained use / long-term reservation discounts), but it's really more than that.
Always Free* products to keep you going.
*Subject to change
How else do you communicate this concisely?
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...
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.
No personal accounts, but then they go on to define basically everyone as "business"...
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.
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 :)
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?
> 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.
Several years ago they emailed (presumably) everyone without a tax number in their account, saying so: 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.
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.
I obviously attributed it to the extremely cool stuff I had been doing there but apparently not:(
The little asterisk saying "subject to change anytime" quickly dispells this myth.
Why choose such a misleading name? Why not just "Free tier"?