The $300 credit and the Always Free tier are not the same thing
When you create a Google Cloud account you get a $300 welcome credit, valid for 90 days. That is a trial. It covers almost anything you can spin up, and when the 90 days expire — or the $300 runs out, whichever comes first — it is gone.
Separately, and permanently, there is the Always Free tier: a set of per-service monthly allowances that do not expire. They are small, but they are genuinely indefinite, and a modest side project can sit inside them more or less forever.
The trap is assuming the trial and the free tier are one offer. People build something during the 90-day trial that comfortably exceeds the Always Free limits, the credit expires, and the same workload starts billing at full price. Nothing changed except the funding.
The Always Free limits that matter for a small app
Per month, and they do not expire. Region restrictions are real — an `e2-micro` in the wrong region is simply a paid VM.
| Service | Always Free allowance | Catch |
|---|---|---|
| Compute Engine | 1 non-preemptible e2-micro instance, 30 GB-months standard persistent disk | US regions only: us-west1, us-central1, us-east1. 1 GB egress from North America. |
| Cloud Run | 2 million requests; 360,000 GB-seconds memory; 180,000 vCPU-seconds | Scales to zero, so an idle service genuinely costs nothing. 1 GB egress from North America. |
| Cloud Run functions | 2 million invocations; 400,000 GB-seconds; 200,000 GHz-seconds | 5 GB egress per month. |
| Cloud Storage | 5 GB-months regional storage; 5,000 Class A ops; 50,000 Class B ops | US regions only. 100 GB egress from North America. |
| BigQuery | 1 TiB of querying; 10 GiB of storage | Query volume is easy to blow through with a bad `SELECT *` on a big table. |
| Cloud Build | 2,500 build-minutes | Enough for a small team; a chatty CI pipeline will exceed it. |
| Artifact Registry | 0.5 GB of storage | Container images are big. This is the limit people hit first. |
| Firestore | 1 GiB storage per project; 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, 20,000 deletes per day | Daily, not monthly. 10 GiB egress per month. |
| Pub/Sub | 10 GiB of messages | |
| Cloud Logging | First 50 GiB of log data per project | Verbose debug logging in production eats this fast. |
| Secret Manager | 6 active secret versions; 10,000 access operations | Old versions count until you destroy them. |
Source: Google Cloud Free Program documentation, checked September 2026. Google changes these; treat the table as a starting point and confirm before you rely on it.
Can you actually run something real for free?
For a genuinely small application, yes — and Cloud Run is usually the reason. Because it scales to zero, a service with no traffic consumes no vCPU-seconds and no memory GB-seconds. You are billed for requests you actually serve, and the first two million a month are free.
The realistic free-tier stack is: a container on Cloud Run, a small amount of state in Firestore, static assets in Cloud Storage, images in Artifact Registry, and builds in Cloud Build. A low-traffic app fits inside that with room to spare.
Where it stops being free is predictable. The moment you want a managed relational database, you are paying — Cloud SQL has no Always Free tier at all, and the smallest instance runs continuously whether or not anyone uses it. That single decision moves more projects from $0 to a real monthly bill than anything else.
The other common exit is egress. A site serving large images or video to users outside the free allowance will generate a bill that has nothing to do with compute.
What to do before you build anything
Two things, both of which take ten minutes and both of which people skip.
First, set a budget with alerts, and understand that a Google Cloud budget does not cap spending — it emails you. If you want an actual hard stop you have to build one. We wrote up exactly how in how to set a Google Cloud budget that actually stops the bill.
Second, check whether you qualify for credits before you spend your own money. The Google for Startups Cloud Program hands out significantly more than the $300 welcome credit, and the entry tier does not require a VC introduction — see Google Cloud startup credits.
Common questions
- Does the Google Cloud free tier expire?
- The Always Free per-service allowances do not expire — they reset monthly and continue indefinitely, though Google can change them. The $300 welcome credit is separate and does expire, after 90 days or when the credit is exhausted, whichever comes first.
- Do I need a credit card to use the free tier?
- Yes, Google requires a payment method to verify the account, including for the free trial. You are not charged automatically when the trial ends — the account stays in a suspended state until you explicitly upgrade to a paid account.
- What happens when I exceed an Always Free limit?
- If you are on a paid billing account, you are billed for the overage at standard rates for that service. There is no automatic cut-off, which is why a budget alert plus a hard-stop mechanism matters.
- Is Cloud SQL included in the free tier?
- No. Cloud SQL has no Always Free allowance. Any Cloud SQL instance bills from the moment it exists, and because it runs continuously rather than scaling to zero, it is usually the largest line on a small project bill.
- Is the free tier enough to run a production application?
- For a genuinely low-traffic application with no managed relational database and modest egress, it can be. For anything with real users, persistent relational data, or meaningful bandwidth, plan on a real bill — the free tier is best treated as a way to build and validate without cost, not as a production hosting plan.