7 ms·

Google Cloud Platform Free Tier

243 points by alexgaribay 10y ago

mark_l_watson 10y ago
I have used AppEngine for many years, and occasionally spin up very large compute engine instances as needed. Am I reading this correctly: even though I am an existing customer, I am still eligible for the always free f1 micro instance, and other always free services?
- danielvf 10y ago
  Yes, it looks like this applies to existing, paying customers!
bibinou 10y ago
The Always Free requirements are Google help page copy in a nutshell : You are eligible for Always Free if you meet the following requirements: Not on a custom rate card Have an upgraded billing account Account must be in good standing I know English is not my first language, but reading this, I feel like I know what each word means but the words makes no sense in aggregate. It doesn't seems like there is more information on the current page either. Also I have no idea why the fact that you're providing servers for free forever is not the first and most prominent paragraph, but is actually buried in the middle of the doc page. Except if it's just a terrible attempt at upsell?
- arrosenberg 10y ago
  1. You haven't negotiated a custom rate with Google (e.g. Snapchat wouldn't be eligible for the free tier). 2. According to the FAQ, this is basically a paid account (as opposed to a free trial) with automatic billing for charges above what the free tier offers. 3. This means you have to pay your bills. E.g. if you have overdue bills, your account isn't in good standing.
- nisa 10y ago
  You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before. Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this time. The free trial is for new customers only." The specs: Always Free Usage Limits As part of ... Free Tier, Compute Engine offers an amount of usage that is free to use, up to a specific limit. If you go over these usage limits and are no longer in the free trial period, you will be charged according to the price sheet. 1 f1-micro VM instance per month (US regions only). - f1-micro: 600MB memory, 0.2vCPU that can burst up to a full core. 30 GB of HDD persistent disk storage per month. 5 GB of snapshot storage per month. 1 GB egress from North America to other destinations per month (excluding Australia and China). - not sure what that means, you have to pay for traffic from Australia/China? 1TB is 119€ through. https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress For f1-micro instances, you receive free usage equivalent to the number of total hours within the current month, enough to run one instance without interruption for the entire month.
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    > You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before. > > Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this time. The free trial is for new customers only." That's just for the $300 free credit though, right? You can still use all the "Always Free" services.
    - nisa 10y ago
      Not sure, I have a credit card there and 0€ balance, can't find the knob for the free tier, when I create a f1-micro I'm billed. Maybe I have to put up money?
      - Ajedi32 10y ago
        According to [the FAQ][1] it seems like you just use the instances like normal and you won't be billed as long as you don't exceed the free usage limits... [1]: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-questions#always-free https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-question...
punjabisingh 10y ago
Always Free* products to keep you going. *Subject to change That's not quite what "always free" means, but I'll always take it. *Subject to change.
- CobrastanJorji 10y ago
  Logically, I agree with you. In practice, I believe that this is in fact exactly what "always free" usually means.
- libria 10y ago
  > The offer does not expire, but Google reserves the right to change the offering, including changing or eliminating usage limits, subject to 30 days advanced notice. How else do you communicate this concisely?
zedpm 10y ago
Wow, this is a big deal. This is enough to run personal or PoC projects just on the Always Free Tier, but the fact that you can stack the $300 credit on top of the free tier is crazy: > You are eligible for Always Free usage amounts during the free trial period. Always Free usage does not count against your free trial credits. For example, only the portion of your Google App Engine usage above the App Engine free daily usage limits is charged against your $300 credit. In addition, if your App Engine usage is below the free daily usage limits, your app will continue to run even after the free trial ends.
atkbro 10y ago
Great, the only account type available in Finland is "Business" so that's a no-go for me. Is there a reason why? Pretty much every other provider out there (amazon, azure, ovh to name a few) have no problem giving out accounts to individual users.
- Schaulustiger 10y ago
  Yep, same problem trying to get the free tier here in Germany: I have to create a business account. Well, no GCP for me. I hope they reconsider this unfortunate restriction.
- zeeZ 10y ago
  This is the only information I could find: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 No personal accounts, but then they go on to define basically everyone as "business"...
BenElgar 10y ago
Finally! I've been making the point for years now that the reason new developers start with AWS is because of their much more useful 12 month free tier. People from GCP would come to our university every couple of years and ask us "Why don't you use GCP?" and be told by countless computer science undergraduates that they didn't NEED $300 for a couple of months, they needed at least a year of time with a cheap instance or two. It seems they finally listened.
thejosh 10y ago
Oh this page mentions the Australian location, guess we're getting closer to the region finally launching :).
Operyl 10y ago
I was wondering how long until Google would try to one-up Amazon in this case.
therealmarv 10y ago
Wow, looking at this numbers I think you can run small production ready things with that.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- azinman2 10y ago
  Ya no kidding. This free tier is actually pretty generous. I imagine they found that these limits enables most people to start on GCE for free and only start paying when things become real. I do wonder, however, how much that long tail will cost them. 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example.
  - Ajedi32 10y ago
    > 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example Are you sure? To me that sounds like it'll let you store 1 GB indefinitely, or 0.5 GB once a day for 12 hours; not 1 GB for a day on day 1, 2 GB for a day on day 2, etc...
    - brightsize 10y ago
      "1GB indefinitely" is the case I think. The legacy GAE datastore allows you to store 1G of data for free over the course of a month. Datastore I/O is charged separately after free limits are exceeded. If I understand correctly the Cloud Datastore is the legacy GAE datastore with a different API (no NDB) and the free tier for both is essentially the same.
habosa 10y ago
Disclaimer: I work at Google (on Firebase). I knew about the free tier, but until I saw this page I had never really thought about all the free tier offerings together. We live in a really cool time to be programmers. 5 years ago most of the services on that page were unimaginable to the average dev. Today they're not only easy to deploy but free for lightweight usage. Makes me really excited to build things over the next few years.
- nunez 10y ago
  I agree. I can't wait to see what people do with Cloud OCR.
wnevets 10y ago
My free credits expired years ago :(
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  But you are just as able as anyone else to use the free tier.
hnaparst 10y ago
Yes, now I don't have to buy a reserved EC2 instance for my web site. This will finally push me over to the Google ecosystem.
jaypaulynice 10y ago
I was excited for a second, but nothing has changed from what was there already...$300 credit that can be used within 12 months. Am I mistaken?
- alexgaribay 10y ago
  The $300 previously only applied for 60 days.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - jaypaulynice 10y ago
    Even a toy project will burn through this in less than 60 days...I was expecting a free tier as in free up to 1GB or something like that...a little misleading because the site makes it sound that.
    - thesandlord 10y ago
      There is a permanent free tier for many products like App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, etc in addition to the $300 you can spend for 12 months.
    - ktta 10y ago
      There is an always free tier which, if I'm not wrong, should be free forever.
    - jaegerpicker 10y ago
      That's exactly what the Always Free Tier is. 1 free micro instance with 30GB storage for free always. The App Engine is 28 hours per month for free.
      - Ajedi32 10y ago
        It actually says 28 instance hours per day, not 28 instance hours per month. So you can run one instance indefinitely, and still have 4 instance-hours left over for testing or whatever.
chpmrc 10y ago
Do they finally accept prepaid cards? I chose AWS mainly because I don't have a credit card.
- rshm 10y ago
  Even with regular cards, in my case they wanted proof of address sent to them.
  - chpmrc 10y ago
    And I have just read you can link your bank account. Uh, no thanks.
nandhp 10y ago
I'm confused by how they're presenting the "Always Free" tier of Google App Engine. I've used the free tier of that for years and "instance hours" have never been a thing that I'm aware of. I'm also wondering if the GAE free quota will require a billing-enabled account now, as these other offers seem to require, which would be disappointing.
- clintonc 10y ago
  Instance hours come into play when, for example, you run multiple versions of an app that get traffic, multiple instances for handling high load, or if you have separate front- and back-end instances. A typical user only has one instance going at a time, so no more than 24 instance-hours. (Instance hours have been a thing for at least a couple of years.)
jnsaff2 10y ago
I noticed this morning (UTC) that my 40 something days of trial had turned intp 300 something, but there had been no announcement and the docs were still at 60 days. I obviously attributed it to the extremely cool stuff I had been doing there but apparently not:(
oddevan 10y ago
So is the Compute Engine basically a VPS? If so, is it roughly equivalent to the base-tier DigitalOcean offering? Sorry for the stupid question; it just seems like I'm missing something!
- jsolson 10y ago
  Thinking of it that way for single-node configurations (or static collections of multiple nodes) makes sense, yes. A lot of the promise of GCE and GCP generally come from on-demand scalability, autoscaling, serverless, etc. Those become much more relevant as projects scale from a small set of fairly static resource requirements to larger and more dynamic usage. Take a hypothetical online retailer -- they might need few hundred cores at night while their users are asleep, a few thousand during the day, and tens of thousands on, say, black Friday. GCE lets you do that kind of scaling as-needed rather than having to provision far in advance (although there are pricing advantages if you can commit to cores and RAM over the long term). (note: I work on GCE)
  - Mithorium 10y ago
    so this free* f1-micro instance of GCE, with the most basic usage of say, running a slack bot/nginx/random test projects, without the need for dynamic scaling, would be functionally identical to a VM anywhere else? can I keep it on 24/7? can I ssh to it, or do I need to use this cloud shell thing? can I have one of every free tier thing or does free tier mean choose one from the set *subject to change
    - fp1989 10y ago
      You can do everything the same as a regular instance f1-micro. There is no functional distinction. It is simply that you do not get charged for the equivalent of 1-instance month worth of usage. You can use the free tier of every product listed in conjunction with one another. No need to pick and choose. I work for GCP and was the lead for the Always Free launch.
      - 10y ago
jacobparker 10y ago
This page is awesome. It's so much easier to read vs. AWS. The pie chart explaining why they are cheaper is well-designed (the use of layering to group the breakdown, numeric labels, aligning the important segment to 12 o'clock) and effective (uncommon for pie charts.) I've always appreciated how their time-limited free tier is based on dollars rather than some proxy (e.g. how AWS limits which kind of things you can use/sizes of things/quotas etc. for their time-limited free tier) and this page helps clearly separate the "free trial" vs. "free quota" which AWS makes a mess of in their documentation in my opinion. Minor gripe/idea for the future: I didn't realize (maybe it's new?) that you can get a free f1-micro. It's too bad that the minimum container engine cluster size is 3 with f1-micros.. it'd be cool to have a hosted/managed k8s cluster that was free by default until you scaled up (with some effort (e.g. node pools to use larger instances/pre-emptible instances when scaled) it could work very well for personal projects that receive very little load/mostly receive load when I'm actively using them.) That's not to say that I don't appreciate what is free today or that I can't afford a small personal K8S cluster :)
- TripleA 10y ago
  The f1-micro is new: "New additions include Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions, bringing the number of Always Free products up to 15." https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google-Cloud-Platform-your-Next-home-in-the-cloud.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google-Cloud-Pl...
indiansama 10y ago
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/visulsign/e/2486abc38d2369e4b0aa911c21b95ce8 http://blog.goo.ne.jp/visulsign/e/2486abc38d2369e4b0aa911c21...
fpgaminer 10y ago
To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a lot of their services for a long time now. I assume there must be diffs here, or else this is just a PR move to remind devs that GCP has free tiers. I do want to express my gratitude to GCP for their free tiers. It has enabled me to offer a various online tools to help some of my teacher friends. It makes it easy to just throw together an app like I normally do, but not incur the costs for these lightweight situations. The alternative is to spend my time finding ways to run and manage the stuff for free using local servers or something, which is usually more pain than the simple tools are worth. The free tiers are also one of the reasons I tend to throw all my hobby projects at GCP instead of AWS. GCP services also tend to be easier to use than the equivalent AWS services. Mostly because GCP has a lot less to customize. That's both good and bad, but for hobby projects it comes out net-good. AppEngine is also amazing, if your workload can fit within its limitations. Again, for me it's about reducing hassle so I can focus on tinkering with ideas and projects, which is what AppEngine lets me do. All that good stuff said, I would _never_ recommend GCP for big projects, companies, etc. The platform is rife with instabilities, bugs, backwards incompatible changes, etc. This is from personal experience running a service at a small company, and from my friend's experience running a huge service at a large company. EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's no free tier on Cloud SQL. Without a free tier it's something like $10-$20/month to run a managed SQL server. So I end up doing everything with Datastore, which is their NoSQL offering. What a huge pain to munge all my data patterns to fit within the limitations of NoSQL. I really wish there was a similarly pay-as-you-go alternative but with real relational queries. Or, you know, a free tier on Cloud SQL... :)
- StevePerkins 10y ago
  Have they always given away a free GCE VM instance, though? This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering (which in turn feeds Google more business if your personal tinkering turns serious, or if you favor Google for professional work later because that what you've grown used to). There are a lot of other things on that page for which I've likewise never heard of a free tier. But the raw VM instance one is what jumped off the page at me.
lramaja 10y ago
This is awesome. I can finally really get into machine learning. I was afraid of the potential cost on aws + I can't afford a gpu. Game changer!
itp 10y ago
Meta question, what did this article do to get driven off of the front page so mercilessly? It's in free fall at this point!
fisker 10y ago
This is really confusing (perhaps deceptive).. after "upgrading" a billing account it appeared to create a new account showing $300.00 remaining, but the new account is closed and there is no way to open it, so no projects can be linked to it..
angryasian 10y ago
I don't know this might be off topic , but what is the difference now between google compute engine and google app engine flexible now.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  As I understand, App Engine Flexible has automated (and customizable) health checks and configurable scaling (and probably some other services I'm forgetting) on top of "bare" computer engine VMs.
- njitram 10y ago
  That's explained here: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-environments#comparing_the_flexible_environment_to_compute_engine https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-enviro... Most important difference; the app engine is fully managed by Google (so they do security updates etc), with Compute Engine you have to do it yourself.
christop 10y ago
Unfortunately, you're still not allowed to use Google Cloud Platform for personal usage if you're based in Europe. Several years ago they emailed (presumably) everyone without a tax number in their account, saying so: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 Trying to add a billing account just now from a European country doesn't give the choice of account type; it's fixed to "business" and can't be edited. So without a billing account, it seems nobody in Europe can use the free tier for personal use.
e28eta 10y ago
I've never used GCP. Does anyone know at what granularity the Always Free service limits apply? Is it per Google account, per credit card, per billing name & address, something else? Obviously they shouldn't be in the business of handing out unlimited f1-micros (etc), but I'm curious how you'd go about having more than one small project.
londons_explore 10y ago
Calling it "Always Free" suggests to me it will be free forever. The little asterisk saying "subject to change anytime" quickly dispells this myth. Why choose such a misleading name? Why not just "Free tier"?
rayalez 10y ago
Whoah, this is really cool! I've been looking to begin exploring and learning GCP for awhile, and this is an excellent reason to get started! I'll deploy something on there right away!

243 points by alexgaribay 10y ago

I have used AppEngine for many years, and occasionally spin up very large compute engine instances as needed. Am I reading this correctly: even though I am an existing customer, I am still eligible for the always free f1 micro instance, and other always free services?

danielvf 10y ago
Yes, it looks like this applies to existing, paying customers!

bibinou 10y ago

The Always Free requirements are Google help page copy in a nutshell : You are eligible for Always Free if you meet the following requirements: Not on a custom rate card Have an upgraded billing account Account must be in good standing I know English is not my first language, but reading this, I feel like I know what each word means but the words makes no sense in aggregate. It doesn't seems like there is more information on the current page either. Also I have no idea why the fact that you're providing servers for free forever is not the first and most prominent paragraph, but is actually buried in the middle of the doc page. Except if it's just a terrible attempt at upsell?

arrosenberg 10y ago
1. You haven't negotiated a custom rate with Google (e.g. Snapchat wouldn't be eligible for the free tier). 2. According to the FAQ, this is basically a paid account (as opposed to a free trial) with automatic billing for charges above what the free tier offers. 3. This means you have to pay your bills. E.g. if you have overdue bills, your account isn't in good standing.
nisa 10y ago
You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before. Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this time. The free trial is for new customers only." The specs: Always Free Usage Limits As part of ... Free Tier, Compute Engine offers an amount of usage that is free to use, up to a specific limit. If you go over these usage limits and are no longer in the free trial period, you will be charged according to the price sheet. 1 f1-micro VM instance per month (US regions only). - f1-micro: 600MB memory, 0.2vCPU that can burst up to a full core. 30 GB of HDD persistent disk storage per month. 5 GB of snapshot storage per month. 1 GB egress from North America to other destinations per month (excluding Australia and China). - not sure what that means, you have to pay for traffic from Australia/China? 1TB is 119€ through. https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#internet_egress For f1-micro instances, you receive free usage equivalent to the number of total hours within the current month, enough to run one instance without interruption for the entire month.
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  > You are also out of luck if you ever used a trail with your account before. > > Got this message: "Sorry, you aren't eligible for a free trial at this time. The free trial is for new customers only." That's just for the $300 free credit though, right? You can still use all the "Always Free" services.
  - nisa 10y ago
    Not sure, I have a credit card there and 0€ balance, can't find the knob for the free tier, when I create a f1-micro I'm billed. Maybe I have to put up money?
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      According to [the FAQ][1] it seems like you just use the instances like normal and you won't be billed as long as you don't exceed the free usage limits... [1]: https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-questions#always-free https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/frequently-asked-question...

punjabisingh 10y ago

Always Free* products to keep you going. *Subject to change That's not quite what "always free" means, but I'll always take it. *Subject to change.

CobrastanJorji 10y ago
Logically, I agree with you. In practice, I believe that this is in fact exactly what "always free" usually means.
libria 10y ago
> The offer does not expire, but Google reserves the right to change the offering, including changing or eliminating usage limits, subject to 30 days advanced notice. How else do you communicate this concisely?

zedpm 10y ago

Wow, this is a big deal. This is enough to run personal or PoC projects just on the Always Free Tier, but the fact that you can stack the $300 credit on top of the free tier is crazy: > You are eligible for Always Free usage amounts during the free trial period. Always Free usage does not count against your free trial credits. For example, only the portion of your Google App Engine usage above the App Engine free daily usage limits is charged against your $300 credit. In addition, if your App Engine usage is below the free daily usage limits, your app will continue to run even after the free trial ends.

atkbro 10y ago

Great, the only account type available in Finland is "Business" so that's a no-go for me. Is there a reason why? Pretty much every other provider out there (amazon, azure, ovh to name a few) have no problem giving out accounts to individual users.

Schaulustiger 10y ago
Yep, same problem trying to get the free tier here in Germany: I have to create a business account. Well, no GCP for me. I hope they reconsider this unfortunate restriction.
zeeZ 10y ago
This is the only information I could find: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 No personal accounts, but then they go on to define basically everyone as "business"...

BenElgar 10y ago

Finally! I've been making the point for years now that the reason new developers start with AWS is because of their much more useful 12 month free tier. People from GCP would come to our university every couple of years and ask us "Why don't you use GCP?" and be told by countless computer science undergraduates that they didn't NEED $300 for a couple of months, they needed at least a year of time with a cheap instance or two. It seems they finally listened.

thejosh 10y ago

Oh this page mentions the Australian location, guess we're getting closer to the region finally launching :).

Operyl 10y ago

I was wondering how long until Google would try to one-up Amazon in this case.

therealmarv 10y ago

Wow, looking at this numbers I think you can run small production ready things with that.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
azinman2 10y ago
Ya no kidding. This free tier is actually pretty generous. I imagine they found that these limits enables most people to start on GCE for free and only start paying when things become real. I do wonder, however, how much that long tail will cost them. 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example.
- Ajedi32 10y ago
  > 1GB storage / day can quickly add up, for example Are you sure? To me that sounds like it'll let you store 1 GB indefinitely, or 0.5 GB once a day for 12 hours; not 1 GB for a day on day 1, 2 GB for a day on day 2, etc...
  - brightsize 10y ago
    "1GB indefinitely" is the case I think. The legacy GAE datastore allows you to store 1G of data for free over the course of a month. Datastore I/O is charged separately after free limits are exceeded. If I understand correctly the Cloud Datastore is the legacy GAE datastore with a different API (no NDB) and the free tier for both is essentially the same.

habosa 10y ago

Disclaimer: I work at Google (on Firebase). I knew about the free tier, but until I saw this page I had never really thought about all the free tier offerings together. We live in a really cool time to be programmers. 5 years ago most of the services on that page were unimaginable to the average dev. Today they're not only easy to deploy but free for lightweight usage. Makes me really excited to build things over the next few years.

nunez 10y ago
I agree. I can't wait to see what people do with Cloud OCR.

wnevets 10y ago

My free credits expired years ago :(

dragonwriter 10y ago
But you are just as able as anyone else to use the free tier.

hnaparst 10y ago

Yes, now I don't have to buy a reserved EC2 instance for my web site. This will finally push me over to the Google ecosystem.

jaypaulynice 10y ago

I was excited for a second, but nothing has changed from what was there already...$300 credit that can be used within 12 months. Am I mistaken?

alexgaribay 10y ago
The $300 previously only applied for 60 days.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jaypaulynice 10y ago
  Even a toy project will burn through this in less than 60 days...I was expecting a free tier as in free up to 1GB or something like that...a little misleading because the site makes it sound that.
  - thesandlord 10y ago
    There is a permanent free tier for many products like App Engine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, etc in addition to the $300 you can spend for 12 months.
  - ktta 10y ago
    There is an always free tier which, if I'm not wrong, should be free forever.
  - jaegerpicker 10y ago
    That's exactly what the Always Free Tier is. 1 free micro instance with 30GB storage for free always. The App Engine is 28 hours per month for free.
    - Ajedi32 10y ago
      It actually says 28 instance hours per day, not 28 instance hours per month. So you can run one instance indefinitely, and still have 4 instance-hours left over for testing or whatever.

chpmrc 10y ago

Do they finally accept prepaid cards? I chose AWS mainly because I don't have a credit card.

rshm 10y ago
Even with regular cards, in my case they wanted proof of address sent to them.
- chpmrc 10y ago
  And I have just read you can link your bank account. Uh, no thanks.

nandhp 10y ago

I'm confused by how they're presenting the "Always Free" tier of Google App Engine. I've used the free tier of that for years and "instance hours" have never been a thing that I'm aware of. I'm also wondering if the GAE free quota will require a billing-enabled account now, as these other offers seem to require, which would be disappointing.

clintonc 10y ago
Instance hours come into play when, for example, you run multiple versions of an app that get traffic, multiple instances for handling high load, or if you have separate front- and back-end instances. A typical user only has one instance going at a time, so no more than 24 instance-hours. (Instance hours have been a thing for at least a couple of years.)

jnsaff2 10y ago

I noticed this morning (UTC) that my 40 something days of trial had turned intp 300 something, but there had been no announcement and the docs were still at 60 days. I obviously attributed it to the extremely cool stuff I had been doing there but apparently not:(

oddevan 10y ago

So is the Compute Engine basically a VPS? If so, is it roughly equivalent to the base-tier DigitalOcean offering? Sorry for the stupid question; it just seems like I'm missing something!

jsolson 10y ago
Thinking of it that way for single-node configurations (or static collections of multiple nodes) makes sense, yes. A lot of the promise of GCE and GCP generally come from on-demand scalability, autoscaling, serverless, etc. Those become much more relevant as projects scale from a small set of fairly static resource requirements to larger and more dynamic usage. Take a hypothetical online retailer -- they might need few hundred cores at night while their users are asleep, a few thousand during the day, and tens of thousands on, say, black Friday. GCE lets you do that kind of scaling as-needed rather than having to provision far in advance (although there are pricing advantages if you can commit to cores and RAM over the long term). (note: I work on GCE)
- Mithorium 10y ago
  so this free* f1-micro instance of GCE, with the most basic usage of say, running a slack bot/nginx/random test projects, without the need for dynamic scaling, would be functionally identical to a VM anywhere else? can I keep it on 24/7? can I ssh to it, or do I need to use this cloud shell thing? can I have one of every free tier thing or does free tier mean choose one from the set *subject to change
  - fp1989 10y ago
    You can do everything the same as a regular instance f1-micro. There is no functional distinction. It is simply that you do not get charged for the equivalent of 1-instance month worth of usage. You can use the free tier of every product listed in conjunction with one another. No need to pick and choose. I work for GCP and was the lead for the Always Free launch.
    - 10y ago

jacobparker 10y ago

This page is awesome. It's so much easier to read vs. AWS. The pie chart explaining why they are cheaper is well-designed (the use of layering to group the breakdown, numeric labels, aligning the important segment to 12 o'clock) and effective (uncommon for pie charts.) I've always appreciated how their time-limited free tier is based on dollars rather than some proxy (e.g. how AWS limits which kind of things you can use/sizes of things/quotas etc. for their time-limited free tier) and this page helps clearly separate the "free trial" vs. "free quota" which AWS makes a mess of in their documentation in my opinion. Minor gripe/idea for the future: I didn't realize (maybe it's new?) that you can get a free f1-micro. It's too bad that the minimum container engine cluster size is 3 with f1-micros.. it'd be cool to have a hosted/managed k8s cluster that was free by default until you scaled up (with some effort (e.g. node pools to use larger instances/pre-emptible instances when scaled) it could work very well for personal projects that receive very little load/mostly receive load when I'm actively using them.) That's not to say that I don't appreciate what is free today or that I can't afford a small personal K8S cluster :)

TripleA 10y ago
The f1-micro is new: "New additions include Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions, bringing the number of Always Free products up to 15." https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google-Cloud-Platform-your-Next-home-in-the-cloud.html https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2017/03/Google-Cloud-Pl...

indiansama 10y ago

http://blog.goo.ne.jp/visulsign/e/2486abc38d2369e4b0aa911c21b95ce8 http://blog.goo.ne.jp/visulsign/e/2486abc38d2369e4b0aa911c21...

fpgaminer 10y ago

To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a lot of their services for a long time now. I assume there must be diffs here, or else this is just a PR move to remind devs that GCP has free tiers. I do want to express my gratitude to GCP for their free tiers. It has enabled me to offer a various online tools to help some of my teacher friends. It makes it easy to just throw together an app like I normally do, but not incur the costs for these lightweight situations. The alternative is to spend my time finding ways to run and manage the stuff for free using local servers or something, which is usually more pain than the simple tools are worth. The free tiers are also one of the reasons I tend to throw all my hobby projects at GCP instead of AWS. GCP services also tend to be easier to use than the equivalent AWS services. Mostly because GCP has a lot less to customize. That's both good and bad, but for hobby projects it comes out net-good. AppEngine is also amazing, if your workload can fit within its limitations. Again, for me it's about reducing hassle so I can focus on tinkering with ideas and projects, which is what AppEngine lets me do. All that good stuff said, I would _never_ recommend GCP for big projects, companies, etc. The platform is rife with instabilities, bugs, backwards incompatible changes, etc. This is from personal experience running a service at a small company, and from my friend's experience running a huge service at a large company. EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's no free tier on Cloud SQL. Without a free tier it's something like $10-$20/month to run a managed SQL server. So I end up doing everything with Datastore, which is their NoSQL offering. What a huge pain to munge all my data patterns to fit within the limitations of NoSQL. I really wish there was a similarly pay-as-you-go alternative but with real relational queries. Or, you know, a free tier on Cloud SQL... :)

StevePerkins 10y ago
Have they always given away a free GCE VM instance, though? This pretty much eliminates the motivation for having a $5/mo Digital Ocean droplet for personal tinkering (which in turn feeds Google more business if your personal tinkering turns serious, or if you favor Google for professional work later because that what you've grown used to). There are a lot of other things on that page for which I've likewise never heard of a free tier. But the raw VM instance one is what jumped off the page at me.

lramaja 10y ago

This is awesome. I can finally really get into machine learning. I was afraid of the potential cost on aws + I can't afford a gpu. Game changer!

itp 10y ago

Meta question, what did this article do to get driven off of the front page so mercilessly? It's in free fall at this point!

fisker 10y ago

This is really confusing (perhaps deceptive).. after "upgrading" a billing account it appeared to create a new account showing $300.00 remaining, but the new account is closed and there is no way to open it, so no projects can be linked to it..

angryasian 10y ago

I don't know this might be off topic , but what is the difference now between google compute engine and google app engine flexible now.

dragonwriter 10y ago
As I understand, App Engine Flexible has automated (and customizable) health checks and configurable scaling (and probably some other services I'm forgetting) on top of "bare" computer engine VMs.
njitram 10y ago
That's explained here: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-environments#comparing_the_flexible_environment_to_compute_engine https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/the-appengine-enviro... Most important difference; the app engine is fully managed by Google (so they do security updates etc), with Compute Engine you have to do it yourself.

christop 10y ago

Unfortunately, you're still not allowed to use Google Cloud Platform for personal usage if you're based in Europe. Several years ago they emailed (presumably) everyone without a tax number in their account, saying so: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602 Trying to add a billing account just now from a European country doesn't give the choice of account type; it's fixed to "business" and can't be edited. So without a billing account, it seems nobody in Europe can use the free tier for personal use.

e28eta 10y ago

I've never used GCP. Does anyone know at what granularity the Always Free service limits apply? Is it per Google account, per credit card, per billing name & address, something else? Obviously they shouldn't be in the business of handing out unlimited f1-micros (etc), but I'm curious how you'd go about having more than one small project.

londons_explore 10y ago

Calling it "Always Free" suggests to me it will be free forever. The little asterisk saying "subject to change anytime" quickly dispells this myth. Why choose such a misleading name? Why not just "Free tier"?

rayalez 10y ago

Whoah, this is really cool! I've been looking to begin exploring and learning GCP for awhile, and this is an excellent reason to get started! I'll deploy something on there right away!