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Google Cloud Free Tier — Cloud Storage

cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-featuresIaaSstorage/google-cloud-free-tier-cloud-storageJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: 5 GB-months of regional storage per month (us-east1/us-west1/us-central1 only), 5,000 Class A ops, 50,000 Class B ops, 100 GB outbound/month from North America.
Verdict: fails: quotathe free allowance is too small to matter
Cost: free tier
Identity: cardcard required, no phone
Binding limit: per-ip-shaping500 GB/day
Evidence: reported2 sources; a third party said so
Freshness: stale on 2026-11-05checked 2026-10-21 (inherited); stale on 2026-11-05

Free tier	5 GB-months of regional storage per month (us-east1/us-west1/us-central1 only), 5,000 Class A ops, 50,000 Class B ops, 100 GB outbound/month from North America. unit GB; metered on stored-bytes
Price	none stated
Limits	per-ip-shaping (binding) 500 GB/day source Storage only free in 3 US regions.
Binding	per-ip-shaping one stream is shaped, and a user's throughput is the shaped rate times the number of streams
Identity	card not published
Egress	'100 GB of outbound data transfer from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month' — free, recurring monthly, applies to all GCP customers, not a trial.
Per-object cap	not stated
Retention	not stated
Interface	s3-compatible, rclone s3
Tooling	GCS JSON/XML API, S3-compatible XML endpoint (rclone 'gcs' and 's3' with GCS provider); gsutil/gcloud storage; signed URLs for public reads.
Composes with	5 GB per billing account. Billing accounts are tied to a payment instrument, so account multiplication is not free/trivial. The real GCP lever is not this tier — it is the $300/90-day trial and the startup credits (below).
Reliability	Rock solid, no data loss or throttling surprises; the limit is purely quota size.
Parsed numbers	per-ip-shaping 500 GB / day

Evidence 2

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features	Cloud Storage row: '5 GB-months of regional storage (US regions only) per month ... 100 GB of outbound data transfer from North America ... per month'
2026-10-21	cloud.google.com/storage/pricing	Standard regional $0.000030137/GiB-hour ≈ $0.022/GiB-month (useful to convert credits to GB-months)

More fields 1

{
 "dead_end": {
  "failure_class": "quota",
  "why": "5 GB-months of regional storage per month (us-east1/us-west1/us-central1 only), 5,000 Class A ops, 50,000 Class B ops, 100 GB outbound/month from North America.",
  "retry_when": null,
  "first_recorded": "2026-10-21"
 }
}

Unknown values 5

$.identity_cost.detail boilerplate
$.per_object_cap.notes the field may be stated in a source that was not read
$.per_object_cap.stated the field may be stated in a source that was not read
$.retention.notes the field may be stated in a source that was not read
$.retention.stated the field may be stated in a source that was not read