GCP Essentials continued — Free Trial & Free Tier

Free Trial

Understanding cost can be intimidating when trying out a cloud provider and you may not be willing to spend money just to try things out. Google Cloud Platform offer both a Free Trial and a (always) Free Tier. Here’s the latest GCP Essentials video series :

When you get started with GCP you can sign up for $300 worth of free credits. This will require you to create an account (if you don’t already have a Google account) and to provide credit card or bank account details. The trial is free and your credit card will not be billed.

You will receive billing statements at the beginning of each month that detail how much of the $300 credit you’ve spent in the previous month. This gives you early data points to understand how much your future service will end up costing when running on GCP, and helps you see where you are consuming most. You can also practice budget management by setting budget alerts.

Once enrolled in the Free Trial, you will be able to spend the credits on the entire platform, for any locations — you are using the real stuff, not some sandbox environment.

This trial remains valid for 12 months or until you use all of the $300. The amount of credit and days remaining are displayed at the top of the Google Cloud Platform Console as well as in the billing section.

If you do use all the credits, you will not be charged but your resources will be paused to a paid account within 30 days. You can upgrade to a paid account at any time and retain whatever is left of the $300. Once you do this you become responsible for the cost of your GCP resources.

Free tier

GCP offers generous Free Tiers for many of its main products. This is sometimes referred to as free quota. These products include App Engine, Compute Engine, Kubernetes Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud Functions, our Cloud Vision, Speech and Natural Language APIs, and more :

GCP customers can use products for free every month. For instance:

• the first 2 million invocations of Cloud Functions
• the first 60 minutes of Cloud Speech API
• the first daily 120 build-minutes of Cloud Build …

… are all free every month and as the name implies, Always Free does not expire!

Subscribe to this publication or to the GCP YouTube channel to get updates to the “GCP Essentials” video series. More content is coming soon, feel free to provide comments (here or in the videos) and suggest topics you’d like to see covered!