Google Cloud external passthrough Network Load Balancer
- Free allowance
- No free tier is stated for the load balancer.
- Verdict
- paidno free allowance; listed for its price
- Cost
- no price statedsee Price below
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- write-gatedbackends must be instance groups or zonal NEGs in the same region and project as the load balancer
- Evidence
- documented2 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-23checked 2026-10-23 (live); stale on 2026-11-23
| Free tier | No free tier is stated for the load balancer. Backends must be instance groups or NEGs: These backends must be in the same region and project. unit none; metered on none |
|---|---|
| Price | unverified |
| Limits |
|
| Binding | write-gated At 1 TiB/month the first thing that stops a user is not a byte count but the backend requirement: the service must already run in the same GCP project and region, which means the origin already has a public address of its own. |
| Identity | card A Google Cloud project with billing enabled; the free trial credit is a credit, not a free tier for this product. |
| Egress | No byte allowance: a forwarding rule is billed hourly and the traffic is billed at Cloud egress rates. The price page could not be read - its extraction returned an unrelated domain-price table.; ingress: tcp+udp free allowance: none published |
| Interface | rest, cli a forwarding rule selects address, protocol and ports and points at one regional backend service |
| Tooling | gcloud, the API or the console; a forwarding rule plus a backend service and health check |
| Composes with | only with a GCP backend, so it chains with a free GCP e2-micro but that VM already has a public IP |
| Reliability | none recorded |
| Notes | UDP is documented and the address can be Premium Tier, which is anycast to the nearest region. It still adds no reachability a GCP VM's own external IP does not already provide, and it is regional rather than global for L4. Hybrid NEGs can point at on-premises hosts through Cloud VPN or Interconnect, which is a route but not a cheap one. |
| Evidence note | documented The protocol list and the backend constraint are quoted from the page read. The price is unverified because the pricing page extraction failed, so the record cannot support a cost claim. |
Evidence 2
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-23 | cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/network | Backend service-based regional external passthrough Network Load Balancers can load-balance TCP, UDP, ESP, GRE, ICMP, and ICMPv6 traffic. |
| 2026-10-23 | cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/network | These backends must be in the same region and project but can be in different VPC networks. |
More fields 7
{
"wg_path": "inside-udp",
"wg_detail": "The backend service forwards TCP, UDP, ESP, GRE, ICMP and ICMPv6, so a WireGuard datagram reaches a GCE backend on the forwarding rule's port.",
"ingress": "tcp+udp",
"volume_tib_month": null,
"volume_stated": "No byte allowance: a forwarding rule is billed hourly and the traffic is billed at Cloud egress rates. The price page could not be read - its extraction returned an unrelated domain-price table.",
"bytes_transit": "yes",
"transit_note": "Google's network carries the bytes to the backend"
}Unknown values 2
$.per_object_cap.statedthe field does not apply to this kind of offer$.retention.statedthe field does not apply to this kind of offer