No, there's an "Always Free" tier, at least with GCE. https://cloud.google.com/free https://cloud.google.com/free For a ZNC bouncer, an e2 micro instance is t

No, there's an "Always Free" tier, at least with GCE. https://cloud.google.com/free https://cloud.google.com/free For a ZNC bouncer, an e2 micro instance is the right option. https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/#compute https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/#compute 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM instance per month in one of the following US regions... 30 GB-months standard persistent disk 5 GB-month snapshot storage in the following regions... 1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month The reason IRC can't have a bouncer capability is that you're then unbounded in terms of storage and memory requirements. IRC, as implemented, is an insanely light server to implement. I ran a college IRC network with a few dozen users on a pair of Mac SE/30s back in the 2002-2004 era - 12MB and 16MB RAM. If you want something persistent, run your own bouncer, or use Matrix or something. Message comes in, message goes out. You don't need much of any actual storage, it's mostly in the network buffers, and IRC tends pretty aggressive about killing off clients that aren't taking traffic.