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Google Cloud Storage Always Free tier

cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-featuresIaaSstorage/google-cloud-storage-always-free-tierJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: 5 GB-months of regional storage (US regions only) + 5,000 Class A ops + 50,000 Class B ops per month.
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: reported4 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 (US regions only) + 5,000 Class A ops + 50,000 Class B ops per month. unit GB; metered on stored-bytes
Price	none stated
Limits	per-ip-shaping (binding) 500 GB/day source 5 GB stored, 100 GB/mo egress, free tier restricted to us-east1/us-west1/us-central1; 5 TiB max object; anonymous writes are correctly refused.
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/month outbound to all destinations excluding China/Australia — described in the Always Free table as '100 GB of outbound data transfer from North America'. Beyond that it is $0.12/GiB, metered. free allowance: 100 GB per month
Per-object cap	not stated
Retention	not stated
Interface	s3, rest, rclone s3
Tooling	Native S3-interoperable XML API + JSON API; rclone 'gcs' backend; gsutil/gcloud storage; signed URLs; HMAC keys make it literally S3.
Composes with	5 GB x N projects. Project creation is capped (~30 default before requesting increase) and soft-deleted projects still count for 30 days, so the practical ceiling is a few hundred GB, not TiB.
Parsed numbers	per-ip-shaping 500 GB / day

Evidence 4

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-21	cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features	'Cloud Storage \| 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	'Data transfer to Worldwide Destinations (excluding Asia & Australia) (per GB) 0 to 10 TiB — $0.12 / 1 GiB'
2026-10-21	storage.googleapis.com/storage/v1/b/gcp-public-data-landsat	probe: GET -> 200 (public buckets are anonymously listable/readable — useful for reading, irrelevant for storage)
2026-10-21	storage.googleapis.com/gcp-public-data-landsat/probe.txt	probe: PUT (anonymous) -> 403 (no anonymous write path)

More fields 1

{
 "dead_end": {
  "failure_class": "quota",
  "why": "5 GB-months of regional storage (US regions only) + 5,000 Class A ops + 50,000 Class B ops per month.",
  "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