Comprehensive guide to every Google Cloud free tier service in 2026. 30+ Always 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 · Not yet reviewed · Data verified from our index of 1,547 developer tools · 28 GCP entries tracked
Three tiers, different rules. GCP bundles its free offerings into three categories. Always Free products have permanent monthly quotas — Cloud Run (2M requests), BigQuery (1 TiB), and 29 other services stay free forever within limits. The $300 Free Trial gives 90 days of full GCP access (credit card required, but won't auto-charge). AI & ML tools have their own free tiers with daily rate limits. Most "GCP free tier" guides conflate these. We separate them.
GCP's unique strength: The Always Free e2-micro VM is the only major cloud provider offering a permanent free virtual machine. Combined with 30 GB persistent disk, you can run a real server 24/7 forever. AWS and Azure don't match this — their free VMs expire after 12 months.
The hidden costs: GCP's free tier has traps — the free VM is region-restricted, egress charges apply everywhere, Firestore daily operation limits are tight, and load balancers are never free. We cover all gotchas below.
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. GCP has the most generous always-free compute tier of any major cloud provider.
| Service | Free Limits | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Compute Engine (e2-micro) | 1 e2-micro VM/month (us-west1, us-central1, us-east1), 30 GB standard persistent disk | Compute |
| Cloud Run | 2M requests/month, 360K GiB-seconds memory, 180K vCPU-seconds | Compute |
| Cloud Functions | 2M invocations/month, 400K GB-seconds, 200K GHz-seconds | Compute |
| App Engine | 28 instance-hours/day (F1 instances), 1 GB egress/day | Compute |
| GKE Autopilot | 1 free zonal cluster (no cluster management fee, pay for pods only) | Containers |
| Cloud Shell | 5 GB persistent home directory, web-based terminal with built-in tools | Dev Tools |
| BigQuery | 1 TiB queries/month, 10 GiB storage, ML model creation included | Analytics |
| Firestore | 1 GiB storage, 50K reads/day, 20K writes/day, 20K deletes/day | Database |
| Cloud Storage | 5 GB-months Standard (us-west1, us-central1, us-east1), 5K Class A ops, 50K Class B ops | Storage |
| Pub/Sub | 10 GiB messages/month | Messaging |
| Cloud Build | 2,500 build-minutes/day (e1-small), 120 builds/day | CI/CD |
| Artifact Registry | 500 MB storage | Containers |
| Cloud Logging | 50 GiB logs ingestion/month, 30-day retention | Logging |
| Cloud Monitoring | All GCP metrics, 500 custom metrics, alerting included | Monitoring |
| Secret Manager | 6 active secret versions, 10K access operations/month | Security |
| Cloud Source Repositories | Up to 5 users, 50 GiB storage, 50 GiB egress | Source Control |
| Cloud Vision API | 1,000 units/month (label detection, face detection, OCR, etc.) | AI/ML |
| Cloud Natural Language API | 5,000 units/month (sentiment analysis, entity extraction) | AI/ML |
| Cloud Speech-to-Text | 60 minutes/month audio transcription | AI/ML |
| Cloud Video Intelligence API | 1,000 units/month (label detection, shot detection) | AI/ML |
| Cloud Translation API | 500K characters/month translation | AI/ML |
| Workflows | 5,000 internal steps/month (external steps free) | Integration |
| Application Integration | 400 executions/month, 2 active connectors | Integration |
| reCAPTCHA Enterprise | 10,000 assessments/month | Security |
| Cloud KMS | 100 active key versions (software keys) | Security |
| Cloud Scheduler | 3 free jobs per billing account | Scheduling |
| Firebase Auth Source ↗ | 50,000 MAUs (phone auth: 10K verifications/month) | Auth |
| Firebase Hosting Source ↗ | 10 GiB storage, 360 MB/day transfer, custom domain + SSL | Hosting |
| Firebase Realtime Database Source ↗ | 1 GB storage, 10 GB/month transfer, 100 simultaneous connections | Database |
| Firebase Remote Config | Unlimited, including A/B testing | Feature Flags |
| Google Cloud Armor | WAF rules evaluated per policy (standard tier free) | Security |
The $300 trial gives full access to every GCP service for 90 days. AI/ML tools have their own always-free tiers with daily rate limits. Gemini Code Assist is new in late 2025.
| Service | Free Limits | Category |
|---|---|---|
| $300 Free Trial Credit | $300 credit for 90 days, full access to all GCP services, credit card required | Trial |
| ★ Vertex AI (Gemini) | Free tier: Gemini 2.5 Flash 500 req/day, Gemini 2.5 Pro 25 req/day | AI/ML |
| ★ Gemini Code Assist | Free individual tier: code completions, chat, multi-file editing (VS Code, JetBrains) | AI Coding |
| Google Colab Unsourced | Free tier: T4 GPU (limited), standard RAM, 12-hour session limit | AI/ML |
| AlloyDB Omni | Free to download and run locally (PostgreSQL-compatible, columnar engine) | Database |
| Looker Studio | Free for individual use (unlimited reports, 10 data sources) | 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 (50K MAUs) + 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. The only major cloud offering a permanent free VM. Great for bots, cron jobs, small web servers. Add Cloud Shell for web-based SSH access.
BigQuery (1 TiB queries/mo + 10 GiB storage) + Looker Studio (unlimited reports). Query terabytes of public datasets or your own data — completely free. Use Cloud Functions to load data on a schedule.
Vertex AI Gemini (free tier) + Cloud Functions + Cloud Storage. Or use Google Colab for notebook-based experimentation with T4 GPU access. For speech, vision, or NLP, the AI APIs have generous monthly free quotas. See our AI/ML tools guide for more options.
Firebase Hosting (10 GiB 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. The #1 surprise is region restrictions on the free VM, followed by egress charges across all services.
All GCP services charge for data leaving Google's network. First 200 GiB/month to worldwide destinations (excl. China/Australia) free on Premium Tier. After that, $0.12/GiB for Americas/EMEA. Internal cross-region transfers also charged.
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.
Firestore free tier is generous on storage (1 GiB) but tight on operations: 50K reads, 20K writes, 20K deletes per day. A moderately active app can hit read limits easily.
The $300 credit expires after 90 days, regardless of balance. When it expires or is exhausted, your account pauses and requires upgrade to paid. No automatic billing (but you lose access).
Google Cloud load balancers are never free. Minimum ~$18/month for a global external load balancer + $0.008-0.012/GB processed. Cloud Run and App Engine include their own load balancing for free.
Persistent disk storage is free (30 GB), but snapshots are not. Each snapshot costs $0.026/GB/month. Automatic snapshot schedules can accumulate costs quietly.
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.
GCP has the most generous always-free compute (permanent VM, Cloud Run 2M req/mo), while AWS has more services overall. 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-month: VMs, SQL, Cosmos DB (1K RU/s + 25 GB). $200 credit | 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 (90 days) | Small web apps, side projects |
| Supabase Source ↗ | 500 MB database, 50K MAU auth, 1 GB storage | Firebase alternative with SQL |
| Vercel Source ↗ | Unlimited deploys (hobby), 100 GB bandwidth, serverless functions | Frontend apps and Jamstack sites |
| Neon Source ↗ | 512 MiB storage, 190 compute hours, branching | Database-only needs with branching |
GCP and Google pricing changes we've tracked. See the full timeline for all 554 tracked changes across all providers.
| Date | Service | Change | Impact |
|---|---|---|---|
| effective Sep 9, 2026 | Google GLM 5 | Data correction - our own entry for Google GLM 5 was incorrect. Google publishes no model called GLM 5; GLM is Zhipu AI's model family, and the catalogue's separate Zhipu AI record already lists the GLM-4 series. The Vertex AI model reference this record cited never writes GLM: that URL redirects to a live Google page of 73,312 readable characters in which GLM appears zero times, and the terms we published from it - '10 frames per second' - are a video sampling rate from the Gemini API documentation. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| discovered Sep 5, 2026 · effective date unknown | Google Meet | The free tier no longer offers the same features. It also mentions 1080p video quality, studio lighting, and noise reduction as premium features available on certain paid plans (Google One, Workspace Business, or Enterprise). Live captions are still mentioned as a feature. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| discovered Sep 3, 2026 · effective date unknown | Google Cloud Pub/Sub | The Always Free tier of 10 GiB messages/month still exists, but it only applies to the Message Delivery Basic SKU. Throughput costs for BigQuery and Cloud Storage subscriptions, as well as import topics, are not free even within the first 10 GiB. Source ↗ | MEDIUM |
| discovered Sep 3, 2026 · effective date unknown | Google Gemini API | The free tier and pricing have been significantly restructured. The current pricing page details Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash, and 3.5 Live Translate with different pricing tiers (Free and Paid) for Standard, Batch, Flexible, and Priority modes. The free tier now offers limited free usage of certain features like Google Search and Maps integration. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Jun 30, 2026 | Google Tenor API | Google Tenor public API shutting down June 30, 2026. New API key signups halted January 13, 2026. Only the public GIF search API is affected — Tenor website and app continue operating. Developers must migrate to alternative GIF APIs Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Jun 1, 2026 | Google Gemini API | Gemini 2.0 Flash and 2.0 Flash-Lite will be deprecated June 1, 2026. Developers must migrate to Gemini 2.5 Flash or 3.x Flash models. Google is consolidating the model lineup — 2.0 generation reaching end of life as 2.5 and 3.x become production-ready. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective May 31, 2026 | Google Maps | Google Maps Platform Client ID authentication sunset. All Client ID-based authentication will stop working. Migration to API key authentication required. Source ↗ | HIGH |
| effective Apr 15, 2026 | 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 13, 2026 | Google Maps Platform | Free tier restructured: Essentials 10K/month, Pro 5K/month, Enterprise 1K/month per SKU We hold no source for this record, so it does not set Google Maps Platform's rating. | LOW |
| effective Apr 12, 2026 | Google BigQuery | Removed: source page no longer accessible or deal program discontinued We hold no source for this record, so it does not set Google BigQuery's rating. | LOW |
| effective Apr 8, 2026 | Google Gemini API | No longer in force (2026-09-05). Gemini API free tier restricted to Flash and Flash-Lite models only (April 2026). Gemini 2.5 Pro and other Pro models now require a paid billing account. Previously free users could access Pro models with rate limits. Combined with April 1 spend cap enforcement, this significantly narrows what is available at $0. No longer in force as of 2026-09-05: this record's own source page gives Gemini 2.5 Pro a Free Tier of "Free of charge" for input and for output. The contrast is on the same table - Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview reads "Not available" in the Free Tier column, which is what a paid-only model looks like there. Gemini 3.1 Pro is paid-only; 2.5 Pro is not. We hold no evidence either way about the state on 2026-04-08, so this is recorded as no longer in force rather than retracted. 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 |
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.
Search GCP free tier services, compare with alternatives, and track pricing changes — all from your AI coding assistant.
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