Google Cloud Free Trial
- 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
- fails: quotathe free allowance is too small to matter
- Cost
- free tierpaid plans from USD 300/TB-month
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- volume-quota$300 of egress at $0.12 per GiB is 2.57 TiB, and the credit expires at 90 days whatever is left
- Evidence
- documented3 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 | 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 downloaded-bytes |
|---|---|
| Price | USD 300 of credit |
| Limits |
|
| Binding | volume-quota at 1 TiB a month the money runs out first: $100 a month of credit buys 826 GiB, so the trial carries 0.86 TiB a month and never reaches the 90-day expiry with credit left. The bandwidth is not the limit; the 2 Gbps egress ceiling on an e2-micro is far above 1 TiB a month. |
| Identity | card During the sign up, you must provide a credit card or other payment method that is valid for the period of the Free Trial. Depending on your country, you might also need to verify your bank account. |
| Egress | $300 of credit at $0.12 per GiB for the first 1,024 GiB per month, so a 90-day trial spends $100 a month and buys 826 GiB a month, or 2.57 TiB in total; ingress: udp free allowance: $300 of credit at $0.12 per GiB for the first 1,024 GiB per month, so a 90-day trial spends $100 a month and buys 826 GiB a month, or 2.57 TiB in total |
| Interface | cli, rest gcloud compute and the Compute Engine REST API |
| Tooling | wg-quick on the VM; Google Cloud CLI for the instance and firewall rule |
| Composes with | the origin half of a tunnel: run wg-quick here and the client connects straight to the public IPv4, with the 2.57 TiB credit as the entire budget |
| Reliability | a trial account that is not upgraded has its projects and resources stopped when the 90 days lapse or the credit is spent |
| Notes | Arithmetic: $300 over 90 days is a $100 monthly budget. The first 1 GiB of each month is free, then $0.12 per GiB: $100 buys 1 + 825 GiB = 826 GiB = 0.81 TiB a month. Spent in one month instead, $300 buys 1 free GiB, 1,023 GiB at $0.12 = $122.76, then $177.24 at $0.11 = 1,611 GiB, so 2,635 GiB = 2.57 TiB total. Either way the credit is short of three months at 1 TiB a month, so the credit binds and the 90-day clock does not. The free-trial page also bars GPUs, quota increases and Windows images on a trial account, none of which touch a WireGuard ingress. |
| Evidence note | documented a probe would settle whether a fresh trial account can open a UDP port on a public IPv4 from a non-card-verified country |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 3
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-23 | cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features | '$300 in free Welcome credit which is valid for 90 days' and 'you must provide a credit card or other payment method' |
| 2026-10-23 | cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing | 'Inbound data transfer No charge for inbound data transfer'; 'Network (data transfer out) TO North America (per GiB in USD) 0 gibibyte to 1 gibibyte $0.00 (Free)'; '1 gibibyte to 1,024 gibibyte $0.12'; '1,024 gibibyte to 10,240 gibibyte $0.11' |
| 2026-10-23 | cloud.google.com/vpc/network-pricing | 'During the Free Trial period, these prices are charged against the Free Trial credit amount', so egress is spendable against the $300 rather than excluded from it |
More fields 7
{
"wg_path": "native-conf",
"wg_detail": "a full Compute Engine VM with a public IPv4 address; wg-quick installs and binds a UDP port with no vendor component in the path",
"ingress": "udp",
"volume_tib_month": 0.86,
"volume_stated": "$300 of credit at $0.12 per GiB for the first 1,024 GiB per month, so a 90-day trial spends $100 a month and buys 826 GiB a month, or 2.57 TiB in total",
"bytes_transit": "yes",
"transit_note": "the VM's outbound packets cross Google's network and are metered as internet data transfer out"
}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