GCP Free Tier: Full Quota Guide for 7 Services

What you actually get free on GCP

Google Cloud’s free offer covers both the core cloud platform and the Firebase product family - Google’s app-development suite built on the same infrastructure - so this guide treats them as one provider. Across GCP's 7 services, 6 give you a permanent monthly allowance, 1 hands out a one-time signup credit, and 7 of 7 publish a pricing page, linked in the table below.

We count Firebase’s free Spark plan as part of Google Cloud’s free tier - Firebase is a Google Cloud product family, and most Firebase services run on the same underlying GCP infrastructure and quotas.

Always free vs free trial vs free credit

GCP's free offers come in three shapes. Each badge links to the full definition of that type.

Always free

Free tier

Products that ship with a permanent free tier - typically a usage cap that resets each month, with paid plans available when you need to scale beyond it.

Free trial

None. Every GCP service here is a permanent recurring allowance or a one-time signup credit rather than a time-boxed trial.

Free credit

A one-off credit applied at signup. You spend it on usage at normal rates; once it runs out the account becomes pay-as-you-go.

Google Cloud

GCP free tier limits, service by service

GCP free tier quotas by service, last verified Aug 18, 2026.
Service	Type	What's free	FTV	Est. value
Firebase Authentication	Free tier	Access to other authentication services included in Spark. Up to 50K monthly active users with Identity Platform. Up to 50 SAML/OIDC monthly active users with Identity Platform. Phone number verification is not included in the free tier; SMS is billed per message.	62	—
Google Cloud	Free credit	$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.	59	$300 one-time credit
Cloud Functions for Firebase	Free tier	No-cost up to 2 million Cloud Functions invocations per month. No-cost up to 400,000 GB-seconds of execution time per month. No-cost up to 200,000 CPU-seconds of execution time per month. No-cost up to 5 GB of outbound networking per month. No-cost up to 120 Cloud Build minutes per day. No-cost up to 500 MB of container storage in Artifact Registry.	58	$7.00 / month
Firebase Realtime Database	Free tier	Simultaneous connections: Up to 100 concurrent connections per database. Stored data: Up to 1 GB of database storage. Downloaded data: Up to 10 GB of downloads per month. Multiple databases per project: Not included in the free tier.	58	$6.00 / month
App Hosting (Firebase)	Free tier	Outgoing bandwidth up to 10 GiB per month for App Hosting. Artifact Registry storage up to 0.5 GB per month. Cloud Run CPU up to 180,000 vCPU-seconds. Cloud Run memory up to 360,000 GiB-seconds. Cloud Run requests up to 2 million requests. Cloud Build up to 2,500 build-minutes. Cloud Logging storage up to 50 GiB per project per month. Cloud Logging retention free for 30 days. Secret Manager up to 6 active secret versions per month. Secret Manager up to 10,000 access operations per month. Secret Manager up to 3 rotation notifications per month. Cloud Storage standard storage up to 5 GB-months in us-central1 only. Cloud Storage Class A operations up to 5,000 in us-central1 only. Cloud Storage Class B operations up to 50,000 in us-central1 only. Cloud Storage data transfer up to 100 GB from North America in us-central1 only.	57	$25 / month
Cloud Firestore	Free tier	Stored data up to 1 GiB total. Network egress up to 10 GiB per month. Document writes up to 20K per day. Document reads up to 50K per day. Document deletes up to 20K per day.	49	$3.00 / month
Firebase Hosting	Free tier	Hosting: 10 GB storage and 360 MB/day data transfer. Hosting: Custom domain and SSL support. Hosting: Multiple sites per project. Hosting: No-cost Spark plan with generous usage limits and no payment method needed.	45	—

GCP free tier gotchas

Free trial credit is separate from Always Free

New Google Cloud accounts get a time-limited signup credit for exploring the platform broadly, which is distinct from the permanent Always Free tier that individual services carry on their own. The trial credit expiring doesn’t affect Always Free allowances, and vice versa.

Firebase’s Spark plan vs Blaze upgrade

Firebase services default to the free Spark plan, which caps usage hard. Upgrading a project to the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan to unlock features like outbound networking or Cloud Functions with external API calls still keeps the same free-tier allowances underneath - you’re billed only for usage beyond them.

Quotas are per project, not per account

Google Cloud and Firebase free allowances are scoped to an individual project rather than pooling across every project in your account. Splitting workloads across multiple projects multiplies your effective free allowance rather than sharing a single quota.

Change timeline

Last verified Aug 18, 2026.

FAQ

Is GCP's free tier permanent?

Of the 7 GCP services with a free tier, 6 offer a permanent recurring free allowance, 0 are time-limited introductory or trial offers, and 1 hands out a one-time signup credit.

Which GCP service has the best free tier?

Firebase Authentication scores highest of GCP's services with a free tier, with an FTV score of 62 out of 100.

How many GCP services have a free tier?

7 GCP services offer a genuine free tier. We count Firebase’s free Spark plan as part of Google Cloud’s free tier - Firebase is a Google Cloud product family, and most Firebase services run on the same underlying GCP infrastructure and quotas.

Do I need a credit card for GCP's free tier?

5 of the 7 GCP services let you start without a credit card.

Does GCP give new accounts free credit?

Yes - GCP hands new accounts $300 in one-time signup credit, which you spend on usage at normal rates until it runs out or expires. That credit is separate from the recurring free allowances, which don't draw it down.

See every GCP product's full listing in our Google Cloud Platform company profile, or browse the other provider guides: AWS, Azure, Cloudflare.