What Is Google Cloud Always Free?
Google Cloud Always Free is a set of GCP services that remain free permanently, beyond the initial $300 trial credits. It includes 1 e2-micro VM/month, 5 GB Cloud Storage, 1 TB BigQuery queries/month, and Cloud Functions — available to all GCP accounts with no expiry date.
The Google Cloud Always Free tier is separate from the $300 free trial and never expires. Here are the key Always Free resources:
Compute Engine
1 e2-micro VM per month (2 vCPU, 1 GB RAM) — US regions only (us-central1, us-east1, us-west1). Includes 30 GB HDD disk storage and 1 GB egress per month.
Cloud Storage
5 GB of Regional Cloud Storage per month, including 5,000 Class A operations and 50,000 Class B operations.
BigQuery
1 TB of query processing per month and 10 GB of storage free permanently — the most generous free analytics tier of any cloud provider.
Cloud Functions
2 million invocations/month, 400,000 GB-seconds compute time, and 200,000 GHz-seconds CPU time.
Firestore (NoSQL DB)
1 GB storage, 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, 20,000 deletes per day.
Cloud Run
2 million requests/month, 360,000 vCPU-seconds, 180,000 GB-seconds of memory.
Comparison with AWS Always Free
AWS Lambda: 1 million requests/month (same as GCP). DynamoDB: 25 GB (more than GCP Firestore's 1 GB). GCP BigQuery's 1 TB free queries have no AWS equivalent — Athena charges $5/TB.
Comparison with Oracle Always Free
Oracle gives 4 Arm vCPU + 24 GB RAM permanently — significantly more compute than GCP's 1 e2-micro. But GCP's BigQuery and Cloud Functions free tiers are unmatched by Oracle.
Buying cloud credits from Cloud Accounts is typically 60–80% cheaper than retail rates from AWS, GCP, or Azure. For immediate access without application processes or waiting periods, it's the fastest path to cloud infrastructure.
Also Asked
No — Always Free resources are permanent. The $300 trial credits expire after 90 days, but Always Free resources (e2-micro, Cloud Storage, BigQuery, etc.) continue indefinitely.