The Google Cloud Free Tier: 20+ Products You Can Use for $0
Google Cloud is free to start in two stacking ways — a $300 credit for 90 days and 25 always-free products. Here are the real limits, the surprise-charge culprits, and how to stay at $0.
Yes, Google Cloud is free to start — in two ways that stack. New accounts get $300 in credits to spend over 90 days, and on top of that, 25 products stay free every month within set limits that never expire. The first is a trial; the second is permanent. Confusing the two is the most common beginner mistake, so we'll separate them cleanly, give you the real numbers, and show you how to stay at $0.
The two free things (don't confuse them)
The $300 free trial credit. Every new account gets it, valid for 90 days. You can spend it on almost anything — bigger VMs, Cloud SQL, Vertex AI, GKE clusters. When the 90 days end or the $300 runs out (whichever comes first), paid resources stop. You enter billing details to sign up, but you're not charged until you actively upgrade.
The Always Free tier. A separate, permanent allowance on 25 products. As Google puts it on the free program page, usage up to these limits isn't charged against your $300 credit and the limit doesn't expire (though it's subject to change). This is the part that lets you run a small project indefinitely.
All 25 Always-Free products
Google's Free Tier page lists 25 products with a permanent monthly allowance. Limits are calculated per billing account, and anything above them bills at standard rates. Here is every one, grouped by what it does.
Compute and apps
| Product | Always-Free monthly limit |
|---|---|
| Compute Engine | 1 e2-micro VM (us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1), 30 GB standard disk, 1 GB egress |
| Cloud Run | 2 million requests, 360,000 GB-seconds memory, 180,000 vCPU-seconds |
| Cloud Run functions | 2 million invocations, 400,000 GB-seconds, 5 GB egress |
| App Engine | Standard environment: 28 hours/day of F1 instances, 9 hours/day of B1, 1 GB egress/day |
| Google Kubernetes Engine | One Autopilot or zonal Standard cluster management fee (not the compute under it) |
| Agent Runtime (Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) | 50 vCPU-hours and 100 GiB-hours of RAM |
Data and storage
| Product | Always-Free monthly limit |
|---|---|
| BigQuery | 1 TiB of queries, 10 GiB storage |
| Cloud Storage | 5 GB regional storage (us-east1, us-west1, us-central1), 5,000 Class A and 50,000 Class B operations, 100 GB egress |
| Firestore | 1 GiB storage per project, 50,000 reads / 20,000 writes / 20,000 deletes per day |
| Artifact Registry | 0.5 GB storage |
| Datastream | 100 GiB of change data capture (AlloyDB or Spanner to BigQuery only) |
| Pub/Sub | 10 GiB of messages |
Developer and operations tools
| Product | Always-Free monthly limit |
|---|---|
| Cloud Shell | Free browser terminal with 5 GB persistent disk |
| Cloud Build | 2,500 build-minutes on e2-standard-2 |
| Cloud Deploy | First active delivery pipeline per billing account |
| Cloud Source Repositories | 5 users, 50 GB storage, 50 GB egress |
| Google Cloud Observability | 50 GiB of logs per project, all non-chargeable metrics |
| Workflows | 5,000 internal steps, 2,000 external HTTP calls |
| Application Integration | 400 executions, 20 GiB processed, 2 Google-service connection nodes |
| Workload Manager | 5,000 resource evaluations |
Security
| Product | Always-Free monthly limit |
|---|---|
| Secret Manager | 6 active secret versions, 10,000 access operations |
| Cloud KMS | 100 key versions, 10,000 crypto operations (Autokey keys only) |
| reCAPTCHA | 10,000 assessments |
| Security Command Center | Standard tier misconfiguration and vulnerability scanning |
| Web Risk | 100,000 uris.search calls |
AI and machine learning APIs
| Product | Always-Free monthly limit |
|---|---|
| Cloud Natural Language API | 5,000 units |
| Cloud Vision | 1,000 units |
| Video Intelligence API | 1,000 units |
| Speech-to-Text | 60 minutes (V1 API) |
Google also runs separate free offers outside this list: a no-cost plan for Firebase, a free tier for Gemini models in Google AI Studio, and a Free Usage Cap on Google Maps Platform.
Limits are as published on Google's Free Tier page in October 2026. Google can change them with 30 days' notice, so confirm current values on cloud.google.com/free.
Of all 25, two are quietly excellent for beginners: Cloud Run (charges only while handling a request, and 2M/month covers most small apps) and BigQuery (1 TB of queries is a lot of learning). Both avoid the classic trap of an always-on resource billing you around the clock.
What is NOT free (the surprise-charge culprits)
The danger isn't the free products — it's stepping outside them without noticing.
- Egress. Putting data into Google Cloud is free; serving it out to the internet costs money. Stream large media straight from a Storage bucket and the egress bill bites. Front it with a CDN.
- Wrong region. The free e2-micro only applies in three US regions. Spin one up in Europe or Asia and it's billable from minute one.
- Trial-only services. Cloud SQL, Dataflow, Pub/Sub beyond its allowance, and larger VMs are free during the $300 trial, then they charge. Don't mistake "free on trial" for "Always Free."
- Quotas are per billing account, not per project. Three projects under one account share one e2-micro and one 5 GB Storage quota — not one each.
How to stay at $0
Two guardrails handle nearly all of it:
- Set a budget alert on day one. In Billing → Budgets & alerts, set a budget (even $1) with email alerts. It won't auto-stop spend, but you'll know the instant anything leaves the free tier.
- Prefer scale-to-zero products. Cloud Run and Cloud Functions cost nothing when idle. Always-on VMs and managed databases keep billing whether you use them or not — reserve those for when you genuinely need them.
What to build first on free
Skip the reading and deploy something. Open a free account, then launch one Application Design Template from the console — a three-tier web app or a BigQuery data warehouse. You'll learn the platform's shape in an hour, entirely within the free allowance, and you'll have a running thing to point an AI agent at next.
For the bigger picture of how the catalog fits together, see Google Cloud Solutions, explained.
Explore Related Concepts
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Google Cloud free forever?
The Always Free tier is permanent within monthly limits. The separate $300 credit lasts 90 days. So part of it is free forever; part is a trial.
What happens when the $300 credit runs out?
Paid resources stop. You're not charged automatically — you have to actively upgrade to a paid account to keep using anything beyond the Always Free limits.
Will I be charged automatically?
No. Signing up requires billing details, but Google doesn't charge the card until you choose to upgrade. Exceeding an Always-Free limit on a paid account does incur charges, which is why a budget alert matters.
What's the best free product to start with?
Cloud Run for apps and APIs, BigQuery for data work. Both scale to zero or charge only per query, so neither bills you while idle.