from Hacker News

Google Cloud Platform Free Tier

by alexgaribay on 3/9/17, 7:35 PM with 76 comments

  • by bibinou on 3/9/17, 8:36 PM

    The Always Free requirements are Google help page copy in a nutshell :

      You are eligible for Always Free if you meet the following requirements:

  Not on a custom rate card
  Have an upgraded billing account
  Account must be in good standing
    I know English is not my first language, but reading this, I feel like I know what each word means but the words makes no sense in aggregate.

    It doesn't seems like there is more information on the current page either.

    Also I have no idea why the fact that you're providing servers for free forever is not the first and most prominent paragraph, but is actually buried in the middle of the doc page.

    Except if it's just a terrible attempt at upsell?

  • by zedpm on 3/9/17, 8:44 PM

    Wow, this is a big deal. This is enough to run personal or PoC projects just on the Always Free Tier, but the fact that you can stack the $300 credit on top of the free tier is crazy:

    > You are eligible for Always Free usage amounts during the free trial period. Always Free usage does not count against your free trial credits. For example, only the portion of your Google App Engine usage above the App Engine free daily usage limits is charged against your $300 credit. In addition, if your App Engine usage is below the free daily usage limits, your app will continue to run even after the free trial ends.

  • by habosa on 3/9/17, 8:12 PM

    Disclaimer: I work at Google (on Firebase).

    I knew about the free tier, but until I saw this page I had never really thought about all the free tier offerings together.

    We live in a really cool time to be programmers. 5 years ago most of the services on that page were unimaginable to the average dev. Today they're not only easy to deploy but free for lightweight usage. Makes me really excited to build things over the next few years.

  • by BenElgar on 3/9/17, 9:00 PM

    Finally! I've been making the point for years now that the reason new developers start with AWS is because of their much more useful 12 month free tier. People from GCP would come to our university every couple of years and ask us "Why don't you use GCP?" and be told by countless computer science undergraduates that they didn't NEED $300 for a couple of months, they needed at least a year of time with a cheap instance or two. It seems they finally listened.

  • by jacobparker on 3/9/17, 9:26 PM

    This page is awesome. It's so much easier to read vs. AWS. The pie chart explaining why they are cheaper is well-designed (the use of layering to group the breakdown, numeric labels, aligning the important segment to 12 o'clock) and effective (uncommon for pie charts.)

    I've always appreciated how their time-limited free tier is based on dollars rather than some proxy (e.g. how AWS limits which kind of things you can use/sizes of things/quotas etc. for their time-limited free tier) and this page helps clearly separate the "free trial" vs. "free quota" which AWS makes a mess of in their documentation in my opinion.

    Minor gripe/idea for the future:

    I didn't realize (maybe it's new?) that you can get a free f1-micro. It's too bad that the minimum container engine cluster size is 3 with f1-micros.. it'd be cool to have a hosted/managed k8s cluster that was free by default until you scaled up (with some effort (e.g. node pools to use larger instances/pre-emptible instances when scaled) it could work very well for personal projects that receive very little load/mostly receive load when I'm actively using them.)

    That's not to say that I don't appreciate what is free today or that I can't afford a small personal K8S cluster :)

  • by christop on 3/9/17, 11:42 PM

    Unfortunately, you're still not allowed to use Google Cloud Platform for personal usage if you're based in Europe.

    Several years ago they emailed (presumably) everyone without a tax number in their account, saying so: https://support.google.com/cloud/answer/6090602

    Trying to add a billing account just now from a European country doesn't give the choice of account type; it's fixed to "business" and can't be edited.

    So without a billing account, it seems nobody in Europe can use the free tier for personal use.

  • by fpgaminer on 3/9/17, 9:35 PM

    To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a lot of their services for a long time now. I assume there must be diffs here, or else this is just a PR move to remind devs that GCP has free tiers.

    I do want to express my gratitude to GCP for their free tiers. It has enabled me to offer a various online tools to help some of my teacher friends. It makes it easy to just throw together an app like I normally do, but not incur the costs for these lightweight situations. The alternative is to spend my time finding ways to run and manage the stuff for free using local servers or something, which is usually more pain than the simple tools are worth.

    The free tiers are also one of the reasons I tend to throw all my hobby projects at GCP instead of AWS. GCP services also tend to be easier to use than the equivalent AWS services. Mostly because GCP has a lot less to customize. That's both good and bad, but for hobby projects it comes out net-good.

    AppEngine is also amazing, if your workload can fit within its limitations. Again, for me it's about reducing hassle so I can focus on tinkering with ideas and projects, which is what AppEngine lets me do.

    All that good stuff said, I would _never_ recommend GCP for big projects, companies, etc. The platform is rife with instabilities, bugs, backwards incompatible changes, etc. This is from personal experience running a service at a small company, and from my friend's experience running a huge service at a large company.

    EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects). Databases. There's no free tier on Cloud SQL. Without a free tier it's something like $10-$20/month to run a managed SQL server. So I end up doing everything with Datastore, which is their NoSQL offering. What a huge pain to munge all my data patterns to fit within the limitations of NoSQL. I really wish there was a similarly pay-as-you-go alternative but with real relational queries. Or, you know, a free tier on Cloud SQL... :)

  • by punjabisingh on 3/9/17, 8:42 PM

       Always Free* products to keep you going.
   *Subject to change
    That's not quite what "always free" means, but I'll always take it.

    *Subject to change.

  • by therealmarv on 3/9/17, 8:00 PM

    Wow, looking at this numbers I think you can run small production ready things with that.

  • by mark_l_watson on 3/9/17, 8:30 PM

    I have used AppEngine for many years, and occasionally spin up very large compute engine instances as needed.

    Am I reading this correctly: even though I am an existing customer, I am still eligible for the always free f1 micro instance, and other always free services?

  • by hnaparst on 3/9/17, 8:20 PM

    Yes, now I don't have to buy a reserved EC2 instance for my web site. This will finally push me over to the Google ecosystem.

  • by chpmrc on 3/9/17, 8:29 PM

    Do they finally accept prepaid cards? I chose AWS mainly because I don't have a credit card.

  • by atkbro on 3/9/17, 8:59 PM

    Great, the only account type available in Finland is "Business" so that's a no-go for me.

    Is there a reason why? Pretty much every other provider out there (amazon, azure, ovh to name a few) have no problem giving out accounts to individual users.

  • by rayalez on 3/10/17, 4:30 AM

    Whoah, this is really cool! I've been looking to begin exploring and learning GCP for awhile, and this is an excellent reason to get started! I'll deploy something on there right away!

  • by oddevan on 3/9/17, 9:24 PM

    So is the Compute Engine basically a VPS? If so, is it roughly equivalent to the base-tier DigitalOcean offering? Sorry for the stupid question; it just seems like I'm missing something!

  • by nandhp on 3/9/17, 9:10 PM

    I'm confused by how they're presenting the "Always Free" tier of Google App Engine. I've used the free tier of that for years and "instance hours" have never been a thing that I'm aware of. I'm also wondering if the GAE free quota will require a billing-enabled account now, as these other offers seem to require, which would be disappointing.

  • by jaypaulynice on 3/9/17, 8:22 PM

    I was excited for a second, but nothing has changed from what was there already...$300 credit that can be used within 12 months. Am I mistaken?

  • by e28eta on 3/10/17, 12:25 AM

    I've never used GCP. Does anyone know at what granularity the Always Free service limits apply? Is it per Google account, per credit card, per billing name & address, something else?

    Obviously they shouldn't be in the business of handing out unlimited f1-micros (etc), but I'm curious how you'd go about having more than one small project.

  • by jnsaff2 on 3/9/17, 9:22 PM

    I noticed this morning (UTC) that my 40 something days of trial had turned intp 300 something, but there had been no announcement and the docs were still at 60 days.

    I obviously attributed it to the extremely cool stuff I had been doing there but apparently not:(

  • by londons_explore on 3/10/17, 12:59 AM

    Calling it "Always Free" suggests to me it will be free forever.

    The little asterisk saying "subject to change anytime" quickly dispells this myth.

    Why choose such a misleading name? Why not just "Free tier"?

  • by angryasian on 3/9/17, 11:08 PM

    I don't know this might be off topic , but what is the difference now between google compute engine and google app engine flexible now.

  • by itp on 3/9/17, 10:05 PM

    Meta question, what did this article do to get driven off of the front page so mercilessly? It's in free fall at this point!

  • by thejosh on 3/9/17, 9:02 PM

    Oh this page mentions the Australian location, guess we're getting closer to the region finally launching :).

  • by Operyl on 3/9/17, 7:40 PM

    I was wondering how long until Google would try to one-up Amazon in this case.

  • by fisker on 3/9/17, 10:33 PM

    This is really confusing (perhaps deceptive).. after "upgrading" a billing account it appeared to create a new account showing $300.00 remaining, but the new account is closed and there is no way to open it, so no projects can be linked to it..

  • by lramaja on 3/9/17, 9:36 PM

    This is awesome. I can finally really get into machine learning. I was afraid of the potential cost on aws + I can't afford a gpu. Game changer!

  • by wnevets on 3/9/17, 8:14 PM

    My free credits expired years ago :(