Google Cloud gives new accounts a $300 one-time signup credit rather than an ongoing free tier.
About
Google Cloud is a cloud computing platform that provides infrastructure, managed services, and developer tools for building, deploying, and operating applications. The platform includes compute, storage, databases, networking, data analytics, security, and AI-related services, with access through the Google Cloud Console and APIs.
The free offering includes a $300 credit for new customers, free usage of 20+ products, and perpetual monthly or usage-based limits on selected services such as 1 e2-micro instance per month on Compute Engine, 5 GB-months of Cloud Storage, 1 TB of BigQuery queries per month, and 2 million Cloud Run requests per month. It is aimed at developers and teams evaluating Google Cloud services, with separate trial offers for products such as GKE, Cloud SQL, Spanner, AlloyDB, and Looker.
- $300 new-customer credit
- 20+ free tier products
- 1 e2-micro instance monthly
- 5 GB-months Cloud Storage
- 1 TB BigQuery queries monthly
- 2 million Cloud Run requests
Free Tier Value
This free tier is a strong always-free bundle with meaningful monthly quotas across compute, storage, analytics, AI APIs, and developer tools, but it is still capped in each service rather than unlimited. Because Google Cloud also offers a separate $300 one-time credit for new customers, the recurring free-tier value should be judged from the monthly quotas themselves; at typical paid cloud rates, the bundle is worth well over a basic starter plan, but the exact dollar equivalent depends on which services a buyer would otherwise use. A credit card is required to activate the account, and the free usage resets monthly without expiring.
What's included in the free tier
Verified
- $300 in free credit for new customers to try Google Cloud products and build a proof of concept.
- Free usage of AI APIs, Compute Engine, BigQuery, and other popular products up to monthly limits, not charged against the $300 credit.
- Compute Engine: 1 e2-micro instance per month.
- Cloud Storage: 5 GB-months Standard Storage.
- BigQuery: 1 TB queries per month.
- Cloud Run: 2 million requests per month.
- Google Kubernetes Engine: One Autopilot or Zonal cluster per month.
- Cloud Build: 120 build-minutes per day.
- Operations: Monthly allotments for logging and monitoring.
- Firestore: 1 GB storage.
- Pub/Sub: 10 GB messages per month.
- Cloud Run functions: 2 million invocations per month.
- Vision AI: 1,000 units per month.
- Speech-to-Text: 60 minutes per month.
- Natural Language API: 5,000 units per month.
- Cloud KMS Autokey: 100 active key versions and 10,000 key operations per month.
- Video Intelligence API: 1,000 units per month.
- Workflows: 5,000 free internal steps per month.
- Cloud Source Repositories: Free access for up to five users.
- Secret Manager: 6 secret versions per month.
- Cloud Shell: Includes 5 GB of persistent disk storage.
- Workload Manager: 5,000 resource evaluations per month.
See Google Cloud pricing for current limits.
Paid plans
Google Cloud paid usage
- Broad cloud platform access beyond free-tier quotas
- Compute, storage, data, AI, and networking services
- Usage metered by service-specific rates
- Scales beyond monthly free limits
Google Cloud free trial credit
- credit
- $300 one-time
- One-time signup credit for trying Google Cloud
- Applies to many products until credit is exhausted
- Not charged against always-free monthly quotas
- Requires account activation
Pricing extracted from Google Cloud's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
Common questions
Is Google Cloud free forever?
No. Google Cloud gives new accounts a one-time signup credit of about $300, spent at normal usage rates, then the account moves to pay-as-you-go.
What is Google Cloud's free tier worth?
Google Cloud's free tier is worth about $300 in signup credit. That maps to an FTV score of 59/100. The FTV score is explained at freetier.co/ftv.
