Google Cloud Shell (free with a Google account)
- Free allowance
- 50 hours a week of Cloud Shell, a 12-hour session cap, non-interactive sessions ended after 40 minutes, and 5 GB of persistent disk mounted as $HOME
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quota50 hours a week, resetting weekly; 40 minutes for a non-interactive session; 12 hours maximum
- Evidence
- documented11 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-25checked 2026-10-25 (live); stale on 2026-11-25
| Free tier | 50 hours a week of Cloud Shell, a 12-hour session cap, non-interactive sessions ended after 40 minutes, and 5 GB of persistent disk mounted as $HOME unit hours; metered on wall-clock; The 50 hours is weekly, not monthly, which makes it the largest published hour budget. |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
the 12-hour cap and the 40-minute non-interactive timeout are two different clocks and both bind |
| Binding | volume-quota the 40-minute non-interactive cut is what kills a daemon; the 50-hour week is generous but unrunnable unattended |
| Identity | email a Google account; no card, and no Cloud project is needed to open Cloud Shell itself |
| Egress | no separate egress allowance published for Cloud Shell itself |
| Per-object cap | not applicable: the unit is a session, not an object |
| Retention | 5 GB of $HOME persists between sessions and counts towards the 5 GB limit; anything outside $HOME is lost when the instance terminates |
| Interface | ssh the browser terminal, or the gcloud CLI over a tunnel; no inbound port |
| Tooling | a full shell with gcloud, git, docker and language runtimes |
| Composes with | a 5 GB home directory that outlives the VM, and nothing else |
| Reliability | the backing VM is not dedicated and terminates after 40 minutes of inactivity, so a background process does not survive the tab |
| Notes | RAM and CPU are not on the quotas page read, so the shape is unverified. The 40-minute non-interactive rule is the decisive sentence for a daemon, and it is quoted verbatim. |
| Evidence note | documented quota, session caps and disk are quoted from Google's quotas-and-limits page today. The live path is /shell/docs/quotas-limits. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 11
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-06 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/limitations | 'Non-interactive sessions are ended automatically after 40 minutes. Cloud Shell sessions are capped at 12 hours' |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/limitations | read live: 12-hour session cap and 40-minute non-interactive timeout |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted: 'The default weekly Cloud Shell quota is 50 hours.' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted: 'Cloud Shell provisions 5 GB of free persistent disk storage mounted as your $HOME directory' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted: 'terminates if your session is inactive for 40 minutes. After the instance is terminated, any modifications that you made outside your $HOME directory are lost.' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted: 'Cloud Shell sessions are capped at 12 hours, after which sessions automatically terminate.' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted: 'To prevent your $HOME directory from being deleted due to inactivity for 120 days, start a session.' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted: 'Cloud Shell is intended for interactive use only. Non-interactive sessions are ended automatically after 40 minutes. Cloud Shell sessions are capped at 12 hours, after which sessions automatically terminate.' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted, with a link and code span in the original: 'Cloud Shell provisions 5 GB of free [persistent disk storage](https://docs.cloud.google.com/compute/docs/disks/persistent-disks) mounted as your $HOME directory on the virtual machine instance.' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted, with the code span preserved: 'terminates if your session is inactive for 40 minutes. After the instance is terminated, any modifications that you made outside your $HOME directory are lost.' |
| 2026-10-24 | cloud.google.com/shell/docs/quotas-limits | quoted: 'If you reach your quota, you'll need to wait until the date and time specified before you can use Cloud Shell again' |
More fields 15
{
"shape": {
"vcpu": null,
"ram_gib": null,
"disk_gib": 5,
"gpu_class": null,
"gpu_count": null,
"note": "the quotas page does not state vCPU or RAM; the ephemeral VM shape is unverified"
},
"billing_model": "free",
"session_cap": {
"wall_clock_min": 720,
"idle_reap_s": 2400,
"restart_required": true,
"note": "12 h maximum; 40 min non-interactive cut; 50 h/week"
},
"keep_rate": {
"value": 0.0,
"basis": "the VM is ephemeral and free",
"source": "https://cloud.google.com/shell/docs/limitations"
},
"persistent_storage": {
"included_gib": 5,
"price_gib_month": "free",
"durability": "$HOME only",
"survives_stop": true,
"survives_destroy": false,
"max_retention": "while the account exists"
},
"network_out": {
"allow_outbound": true,
"allow_inbound_listen": false,
"ports": "outbound; inbound only through the web preview proxy",
"static_ip": false,
"ipv6": false,
"per_session_bytes": null
},
"free_tier_kind": "free-forever-with-quota",
"shape_note": "Google does not publish the vCPU or RAM of the Cloud Shell VM on the quotas page; only the 5 GB $HOME is stated. Both are null rather than guessed.",
"term": "none",
"m10h_usd": 0.0,
"m24h_usd": 0.0,
"price_arithmetic": "USD 0.00 for the weekly allowance",
"unattended": false,
"unattended_mechanism": "none: 'Non-interactive sessions are ended automatically after 40 minutes'",
"units": "RAM and disk are quoted in the vendor's own decimal GB, not GiB. The ram_gib and disk_gib keys carry the vendor's number unconverted, so where a vendor writes 30 GB the key holds 30 and the true value is about 27.9 GiB. No conversion was performed."
}