Comprehensive guide to every Google Cloud free tier service in 2026. 20+ free products, $300 trial credit, and hidden costs explained. BigQuery 1 TiB, Cloud Run 2M req/mo, e2-micro VM, and more.
Published 2026-03-27 · Reviewed 2026-09-28, corrections outstanding · Figures compiled 2026-03-27 · 8 of 9 figures in the “Recent GCP & Google Changes” table come from our records for 1,574 developer tools · 28 Google and Firebase entries tracked
Three ways to start free. Google offers the Free Tier, the $300 Free Trial and product-specific free offers such as the Gemini API free tier in Google AI Studio. Google's Free Tier table lists 29 products, including Cloud Run (2 million requests a month) and BigQuery (1 TiB of querying a month). It has no end date, but Google can change or remove its limits with 30 days' notice. Most limits are monthly; App Engine's limits and Firestore's operation limits are daily. The $300 Free Trial runs for 90 days and needs a credit card or other payment method; the trial billing account is not billed. Accounts opened after 2026-03-02 cannot spend the credit on the Gemini API. The Gemini API free tier has per-minute and per-day limits; the Cloud AI APIs in the Free Tier have monthly limits.
The free VM: Always Free includes one e2-micro VM a month in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1, with 30 GB of standard persistent disk.
The hidden costs: the e2-micro VM is free only in us-west1, us-central1 and us-east1. Outbound data transfer beyond each product's free allowance is billed. Firestore's free operations are counted per day. Load balancers are billed (forwarding rules and data processed).
Comparing clouds? See our Cloud Free Tier Comparison for a side-by-side matrix of AWS vs GCP vs Azure vs DigitalOcean.
These products remain free indefinitely within their monthly (or daily) quotas. No expiration, no trial period.
| Service | Free Limits | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Compute Engine (e2-micro) | 1 e2-micro VM/month (us-west1, us-central1, us-east1), 30 GB standard persistent disk Source ↗ | Compute |
| Cloud Run | 2M requests/month, 360K GiB-seconds memory, 180K vCPU-seconds Source ↗ | Compute |
| Cloud Run functions (1st gen) | 2M invocations, 400K GB-seconds, 200K GHz-seconds, 5 GB egress/month. Current Cloud Run functions are billed on Cloud Run pricing. Source ↗ | Compute |
| App Engine | 28 instance-hours/day (F1 instances), 1 GB egress/day Source ↗ | Compute |
| GKE | $74.40/month credit per billing account. Covers the cluster management fee for one Autopilot or zonal Standard cluster; not compute, networking or other resources. Source ↗ | Containers |
| Cloud Shell | 5 GB persistent home directory, web-based terminal with built-in tools Source ↗ | Dev Tools |
| BigQuery | 1 TiB queries/month, 10 GiB storage Source ↗ | Analytics |
| Firestore | 1 GiB storage, 50K reads/day, 20K writes/day, 20K deletes/day Source ↗ | Database |
| Cloud Storage | 5 GB-months Standard (us-west1, us-central1, us-east1), 5K Class A ops, 50K Class B ops Source ↗ | Storage |
| Pub/Sub | 10 GiB messages/month Source ↗ | Messaging |
| Datastream | 100 GiB of change data capture a month per billing account (AlloyDB or Spanner to BigQuery) Source ↗ | Data |
| Cloud Build | 2,500 build-minutes/month (e2-standard-2) Source ↗ | CI/CD |
| Cloud Deploy | First active delivery pipeline per billing account Source ↗ | CI/CD |
| Artifact Registry | 500 MB storage Source ↗ | Containers |
| Cloud Logging | 50 GiB logs ingestion/month, 30-day retention Source ↗ | Logging |
| Cloud Monitoring | All non-chargeable Google Cloud metrics; the first 1 million time series read through the Monitoring API per billing account Source ↗ | Monitoring |
| Workload Manager | 5,000 resource evaluations a month Source ↗ | Management |
| Secret Manager | 6 active secret versions, 10K access operations/month Source ↗ | Security |
| Cloud Source Repositories | Not available to new customers since June 17, 2024. Existing customers keep up to 5 project-users, 50 GB storage and 50 GB egress/month free. Source ↗ | Source Control |
| Cloud Vision API | 1,000 units/month (label detection, face detection, OCR, etc.) Source ↗ | AI/ML |
| Cloud Natural Language API | 5,000 units/month (sentiment analysis, entity extraction) Source ↗ | AI/ML |
| Cloud Speech-to-Text | 60 minutes/month per account on the V1 API. The V2 API has no free minutes. Source ↗ | AI/ML |
| Cloud Video Intelligence API | 1,000 units/month (label detection, shot detection) Source ↗ | AI/ML |
| Cloud Translation API | 500,000 characters/month (applied as a $10 monthly credit) Source ↗ | AI/ML |
| Agent Runtime (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) | First 180,000 vCPU-seconds (50 hours) and 360,000 GiB-seconds of memory a month Source ↗ | AI/ML |
| Workflows | 5,000 internal steps and 2,000 external HTTP calls per month Source ↗ | Integration |
| Application Integration | 400 executions/month, first 2 connection nodes for Google services; up to 20 GiB of data processed per month Source ↗ | Integration |
| reCAPTCHA | 10,000 assessments/month free on the Essentials and Premium tiers, counted per organization. Enterprise tier: $1 per 1,000 assessments on a 12-month commitment. Source ↗ | Security |
| Cloud KMS | 100 active key versions and 10,000 cryptographic operations per month, for keys created with Cloud KMS Autokey Source ↗ | Security |
| Security Command Center | Standard tier Source ↗ | Security |
| Web Risk | 100,000 uris.search calls a month Source ↗ | Security |
| Cloud Scheduler | 3 jobs per billing account per month Source ↗ | Scheduling |
| Firebase Auth Source ↗ | Included at no cost on the Spark plan, except SMS phone sign-in. The 50K-MAU tier requires Identity Platform; Spark projects that upgrade are limited to 3,000 DAU. SAML/OIDC: 50 MAUs on Blaze, 2 DAU on Spark. | Auth |
| Firebase Hosting Source ↗ | 10 GB storage, 360 MB/day transfer, custom domain + SSL | Hosting |
| Firebase Realtime Database Source ↗ | 1 GB storage, 10 GB/month transfer, 100 simultaneous connections | Database |
The $300 trial is credit for Google Cloud products over 90 days; accounts opened after 2026-03-02 cannot spend it on the Gemini API. The Gemini API has its own free tier, with limits shown per project in AI Studio.
| Service | Free Limits | Category |
|---|---|---|
| $300 Free Trial Credit | $300 credit for 90 days. Credit card or other payment method required. Accounts opened after 2026-03-02 cannot spend it on the Gemini API. | Trial |
| ★ Gemini API (AI Studio) | Free tier on the Gemini 3.x Flash and Flash-Lite models; limits shown per project in AI Studio | AI/ML |
| Google Colab Unconfirmed | Free notebooks run for at most 12 hours. GPU access is heavily restricted and GPU types vary. | AI/ML |
| AlloyDB Omni | Free to download and use for development, testing, prototyping and demos; production or data-processing use is paid ($40 per vCPU a month). | Database |
| Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio) | Free for report creators and viewers. Connects to 1,400+ data sources. Data Studio Pro: $9/user/project/month. | Analytics |
Common developer use cases and which GCP free services to combine. All stacks below can run at zero cost within free tier limits.
Cloud Run (2M req/mo) + Firestore (1 GiB) + Firebase Auth + Cloud Logging. Serverless, auto-scales to zero, always free. Best for REST/GraphQL APIs with moderate traffic.
e2-micro VM (us-central1) + 30 GB persistent disk + Cloud Monitoring. Great for bots, cron jobs, small web servers. Add Cloud Shell for web-based SSH access.
BigQuery (1 TiB of queries and 10 GiB of storage a month) + Data Studio (formerly Looker Studio, free for report creators and viewers). Queries past the first 1 TiB a month are billed, including queries on public datasets. Use Cloud Run functions to load data on a schedule.
Gemini API free tier (AI Studio) + Cloud Run functions + Cloud Storage. Or use Google Colab's free notebooks, where GPU access is heavily restricted. The Vision, Natural Language and Speech-to-Text APIs have monthly free quotas. See our AI/ML tools guide for more options.
Firebase Hosting (10 GB storage, custom domain + SSL) + Firebase Auth + Firestore. Or use Cloudflare Pages (unlimited bandwidth, always free) as an alternative. See our Firebase alternatives comparison.
GCP's free tier is generous, but these costs catch developers off guard.
Premium Tier is the default. From us-central1 it costs $0.12 per GiB (up to 1,024 GiB) to North America, Europe and Asia (excluding Korea and Indonesia), and up to $0.23 elsewhere. The Free Tier covers 1 GB a month from North America to every destination except China and Australia, on Premium Tier only; Cloud Storage's Free Tier adds 100 GB. Standard Tier's first 200 GiB a month are free, per account. Cross-region transfer is also billed.
The free e2-micro VM is only free in us-west1, us-central1, and us-east1. Launching in any other region (including Europe, Asia) will incur standard Compute Engine charges.
Class A operations (writes, lists) cost more than Class B (reads). The free tier covers 5K Class A and 50K Class B/month. Heavy write workloads (logging, backups) can exceed this quickly.
The free quota covers the default database only; named databases get none. Free: 1 GiB of storage, plus 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes a day. Past the quota, reads cost $0.03 per 100,000 in us-central1 and $0.06 in the nam5, nam7 and eur3 multi-regions.
The $300 credit lasts 90 days. When it is spent or 90 days pass, the Free Trial billing account closes unless you upgrade to a Paid billing account: resources stop, and data in services such as Compute Engine is marked for deletion. After a 30-day grace period without an upgrade, the resources are permanently deleted. The trial account is not billed, but a billing account set up through AI Studio is billed automatically once its credits are used up or expire.
The first 5 forwarding rules cost $0.025 an hour (about $18.25 for a 730-hour month). Data processed costs $0.008 per GiB in us-central1 and up to $0.0128 per GiB in other regions. Cloud Run and App Engine include their own load balancing for free.
The Free Tier includes 30 GB-months of standard persistent disk and no snapshot storage. Standard snapshot storage costs $0.05 per GB a month in us-central1. Snapshots are incremental and billed on the compressed size of the data changed since the previous snapshot.
BigQuery queries are free up to 1 TiB/month, but streaming inserts cost $0.01/200 MB. Batch loading is free. If your app streams data in real-time, costs can add up.
Here's how they compare for developers building side projects or MVPs. See our AWS Free Tier guide for the full AWS breakdown.
| Provider | Key Free Tier | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| AWS Source ↗ | Always Free: Lambda 1M req/mo, DynamoDB 25 GB, 12-month EC2/RDS | Enterprise workloads, serverless (Lambda) |
| Azure Source ↗ | 12 months: 750 hours each of B2pts v2 and B2ats v2 VMs. Always free: SQL Database (100K vCore seconds/mo, 32 GB), Cosmos DB (1K RU/s, 25 GB). $200 credit for 30 days, then pay-as-you-go to keep the free services. | Microsoft stack teams, enterprise |
| Cloudflare Source ↗ | Workers 100K req/day, R2 10 GB (zero egress), D1 5 GB, Pages unlimited | Edge computing, static sites, storage |
| Railway Source ↗ | $5 free trial credit, usage-based pricing | Quick prototypes, hobby projects |
| Render Source ↗ | Free web services (512 MB RAM), free PostgreSQL (30 days) | Small web apps, side projects |
| Supabase Source ↗ | 500 MB database, 50K MAU auth, 1 GB storage | Firebase alternative with SQL |
| Vercel Source ↗ | Hobby plan (personal, non-commercial use only): 100 deployments/day, 100 GB Fast Data Transfer/month, 1M function invocations/month. | Frontend apps and Jamstack sites |
| Neon Source ↗ | 100 CU-hours and 0.5 GB storage per project, auth up to 60k MAU, branching | Serverless Postgres with branching and scale-to-zero |
GCP and Google pricing changes we've tracked. See the full timeline for all 476 tracked changes across all providers.
| Date | Service | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| effective Jun 30, 2026 | Google Tenor API | Google Tenor API shut down on June 30, 2026, and new API key sign-ups stopped on January 13, 2026. Only the API ended: Tenor.com, the GIF Keyboard apps and Gboard still serve Tenor GIFs. Developers who used the API need another GIF API. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Jun 18, 2026 | Google Gemini Code Assist | Google stopped serving Gemini Code Assist for individuals, its free tier, on 2026-06-18. The IDE extensions and Gemini CLI no longer accept Login with Google for the individuals, Google AI Pro and Google AI Ultra tiers. Standard and Enterprise subscriptions are unchanged. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Jun 18, 2026 | Gemini CLI | Gemini CLI stopped accepting Login with Google for personal accounts on 2026-06-18, which ended the personal-account free tier of 60 requests a minute and 1,000 a day. It still runs with a Gemini API key, Vertex AI, or a Gemini Code Assist Standard or Enterprise licence. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Jun 1, 2026 | Google Gemini API | Gemini 2.0 Flash and 2.0 Flash-Lite were shut down on 2026-06-01, as Google announced on 2026-02-18. Google names gemini-3.6-flash as the replacement for 2.0 Flash and gemini-3.1-flash-lite for 2.0 Flash-Lite. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective May 31, 2026 | Google Maps | Google Maps Platform client ID authentication reached its announced end date on May 31, 2026 and is being phased out: Google periodically blocks client ID requests ahead of a final termination date it has not published. API keys replace it. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective May 19, 2026 | Google added a Google AI Ultra plan at $99.99 a month with $40 a month in Google Cloud credits, and cut the top AI Ultra plan from $249.99 to $199.99 a month; the top plan keeps $100 a month in credits. Source ↗ | MEDIUM | |
| discovered Apr 15, 2026 · effective date unknown | Google Content API for Shopping | Google Content API for Shopping being sunset August 18, 2026. Replaced by Merchant API, rolling out April 22, 2026. Developers must migrate before the sunset deadline. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Apr 1, 2026 | Google Gemini API | Billing-account-level spend caps enforced starting April 1, 2026. When a tier's spend cap is reached, API requests pause until the next billing month. Affects pay-as-you-go developers who may see unexpected request pausing. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Mar 30, 2026 | Standalone Google Developer Program Premium stopped renewing on personal (@gmail.com) accounts: annual plans after 2026-03-30, monthly plans after 2026-06-30. Google had moved its developer benefits into Google AI Pro and AI Ultra on 2026-01-27. Premium on Workspace accounts did not change. Source ↗ | HIGH | |
| effective Mar 19, 2026 | Firebase | Google announced the sunset of Firebase Studio (formerly Project IDX) on 2026-03-19. New workspaces and signups stopped on 2026-06-22, and Firebase Studio shuts down on 2027-03-22, when remaining data is deleted. Other Firebase products are not affected. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| effective Feb 3, 2026 | Firebase | Cloud Storage for Firebase now requires the pay-as-you-go Blaze plan, in effect from February 3, 2026. Projects on the no-cost Spark plan lose access to all Cloud Storage buckets, including default buckets; console access redirects to an upgrade page and API calls return 402 or 403. Provisioning a new default bucket also requires Blaze. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Jan 27, 2026 | Google Developer Program Premium merged into Google One AI Pro ($19.99/mo, includes $10 Cloud credits) and AI Ultra ($100 Cloud credits). Developer benefits now bundled into consumer AI subscriptions Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
A source check reads each cited page for that service's name and a price. The figures in the tables above are from our own records, except for the services whose entry below dates them to a read of the vendor's own page.
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