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Google Cloud makes it easy to get started without spending any money. GCP offers two complementary programmes — the Free Trial (a time-limited credit) and Always Free (a set of services with permanently free usage tiers). Understanding these programmes helps you learn GCP, build prototypes, and run small workloads without incurring charges.
The GCP Free Trial provides new customers with $300 in free credit to use across any GCP service over a 90-day period. This is one of the most generous free trials among major cloud providers.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Credit amount | $300 USD |
| Duration | 90 days from sign-up |
| Services covered | All GCP services (compute, storage, networking, AI, etc.) |
| Credit card required | Yes (for identity verification, but you will not be charged unless you upgrade) |
| Automatic upgrade | No — when the trial ends, your resources are stopped (not deleted). You must explicitly upgrade to a paid account. |
| Restrictions | No more than 8 vCPUs running simultaneously; no GPUs or TPUs; no Windows Server VMs |
When your $300 credit runs out or the 90-day period expires:
You can upgrade at any time during or after the trial:
The Always Free programme provides a set of GCP services with usage limits that are permanently free — they do not expire after 90 days and are available to all GCP accounts (not just free trial accounts).
| Service | Always Free Limit |
|---|---|
| Compute Engine | 1 e2-micro instance per month in select US regions (us-west1, us-central1, us-east1). Includes 30 GB standard persistent disk and 1 GB egress to all regions except China and Australia |
| Cloud Functions | 2 million invocations per month, 400,000 GB-seconds of compute time, 200,000 GHz-seconds, 5 GB of egress per month |
| Cloud Run | 2 million requests per month, 360,000 GB-seconds of memory, 180,000 vCPU-seconds |
| App Engine | 28 instance hours per day for standard environment |
| Service | Always Free Limit |
|---|---|
| Cloud Storage | 5 GB of regional storage in us-east1, us-west1, or us-central1. Includes 5,000 Class A operations and 50,000 Class B operations per month |
| Firestore | 1 GB storage, 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, 20,000 deletes per day |
| Service | Always Free Limit |
|---|---|
| BigQuery | 1 TB of queries per month and 10 GB of active storage per month |
| Pub/Sub | 10 GB of messages per month |
| Service | Always Free Limit |
|---|---|
| Vision AI | 1,000 units per month |
| Natural Language AI | 5,000 units per month |
| Speech-to-Text | 60 minutes per month |
| Translation | 500,000 characters per month |
| Service | Always Free Limit |
|---|---|
| Cloud DNS | 1 million queries per month (for existing zones) |
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