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
Google Cloud’s free tier has two parts: a one-time $300 signup credit and a genuinely useful always-free bundle with quotas like 1 e2-micro VM, 1 TB BigQuery queries, 2M Cloud Run requests, and 5 GB Cloud Storage. Because this is a free-credit listing, the recurring monthly value is set to null; the practical value is still high, roughly 70-80% feature parity with paid usage for small projects, but the credit-card/signup friction and hard caps keep it below any paid plan.
What's included in the free tier
- $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 access to Google Cloud products beyond free-tier quotas
- Scale usage across compute, storage, analytics, AI, networking, and databases
- Charges apply once free monthly limits or free credit are exhausted
- No fixed monthly subscription price shown on the page
Google Cloud committed use / custom enterprise pricing
- Enterprise and large-scale deployments
- Custom pricing and contracts
- Access to the full Google Cloud platform
- Sales-assisted procurement
Pricing extracted from Google Cloud's pricing page. Always verify current pricing before committing.
