Google Cloud Free Trial (USD 300)
- Free allowance
- Signing up for the Free Trial creates a Free Trial billing account that is preloaded with $300 in free Welcome credit which is valid for 90 days.
- Verdict
- triala time-boxed or one-time trial, not a recurring allowance
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- cardcard required, phone required
- Binding limit
- volume-quotaUSD 300 of credit over 90 days from signup
- Evidence
- documented1 source; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-24checked 2026-10-24 (live); stale on 2026-11-24
| Free tier | Signing up for the Free Trial creates a Free Trial billing account that is preloaded with $300 in free Welcome credit which is valid for 90 days. unit mixed; metered on none |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
the credit cannot pay for the Gemini API in AI Studio, for a generative AI partner model sold as a managed API, for Windows Server images, or for Marketplace fees |
| Binding | volume-quota the 90-day clock ends the balance before any usage ceiling is reached |
| Identity | card a credit card or other payment method is required at signup, with a temporary authorisation hold of USD 0.00 to USD 1.00; a consumer Google account is accepted and the page does not ask for a work address; bank or phone verification applies in some countries |
| Egress | egress bills against the credit at list price; the separate always-free allowance is 1 GB a month from North America |
| Per-object cap | not applicable: the offer is a spending balance, not a stored object |
| Retention | the balance is deleted at day 90 or when it is spent, whichever comes first; the trial cannot be paused or extended (90 days) |
| Interface | rest, cli the Google Cloud console, gcloud CLI and every product API |
| Tooling | gcloud, the client libraries, Terraform, and every tool that speaks a Google Cloud API |
| Composes with | this is the general-purpose credit behind a Google Cloud deployment; it pairs with the separate always-free e2-micro record, which has no end date |
| Reliability | the credit expires at day 90 even after the account is upgraded to a paid billing account, and the trial cannot be paused |
| Notes | This is a different record from google-cloud-free-tier, which carries the e2-micro allowance that has no end date. The trial is the largest single balance Google publishes to an individual, and the exclusions decide what it is worth: no GPU on a trial billing account, and no Gemini API spend. A workload that plans to train on a GPU cannot use this credit for it. |
| Evidence note | documented the free-features page was read on 2026-10-23 and states the amount, the 90-day window, the card requirement and the product exclusions. No account was created, so the identity gate is the vendor's sentence and not a completed signup |
Evidence 1
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-23 | cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features | 'Signing up for the Free Trial creates a Free Trial billing account that is preloaded with $300 in free Welcome credit which is valid for 90 days', quoted; the same page states the card requirement, the 90-day expiry after upgrade, and the Gemini API and GPU exclusions |
More fields 8
{
"free_tier_kind": "one-time-credit",
"credit_usd": 300,
"credit_days": 90,
"recurring": false,
"reachable_by": "consumer email plus a card",
"excluded_products": "Gemini API in AI Studio, partner managed models, GPUs on a trial account, Windows Server, Marketplace",
"hourly_usd": {
"e2_standard_4": 0.13402284,
"e2_standard_2_derived": 0.06701142
},
"rate_basis": "e2-standard-4 read from the Google Cloud VM instance pricing page on 2026-10-23; e2-standard-2 is half of it and is derived, not read"
}