Google Cloud Increases Their Free Tier to 200GB Per month in standard tier data
Good news from Google Cloud for all the self hosting nerds and people who hosts stuffs at GCP. Google has just sent an email to their cloud customers about a change in their free tier policy by announcing a free tier 200GB of egress data (standard tier) for free every month up from 0 GB Previously. So if you were using GCP standard tier previously get ready to see a decrease in you cloud bill from November (october usage bill).
Google wrote:
We are writing to let you know that starting October 1, 2023, all existing and new Standard Tier Egress customers will avail their first 200 GB for free in every region that they choose to operate, after which Standard Tier will be billed at current rates.
Here is a snap shot of the email I got
Why We care
Well it is a big deal for both the end user and google cloud. We often want to reduce our cloud bill, and the most volatile and unexpected stuffs can come from egress data usage charge. In the space of free tier hosting almost nobody gives a true free tier option except Oracle cloud and Google Cloud. AWS free tier is valid for 12 months only. Azure’s 1 -2 months depending on your promo credit. Oracle’s free tier was always miles ahead. Google technically offered a true free tier with a e2- micro instance free at us-east-1, us-central-1, and us-west-1, 30 GB standard disk and 1 GB of free premium tier bandwidth ( Australia, and china excluded). Well 1 GB is nothing. And it always scared people like me from lunching public facing stuff in GCP. DigitalOcean, Linode offers bulk 500 GB/1 TB which is more predictable.
But with this change i.e. 200 GB paired with 1 e2 micro instance (1CPU 1 GB RAM) for free is a pretty good deal now. 200 GB is standard tier though. And it does increase latency in long distance( yes i tested it about 15% more latency). But it is a solid deal to consider. 1 GB of standard tier data costs about 4 to 11 cents so it can save 8 to 22 bucks a month.
Why Google cares
Well Google has been trying to catch a bigger portion of cloud market for a long time. And it is a step towards that direction. The name Google sounds big, but surprisingly they only hold roughly 10% of cloud market. The big boys here are Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS. Don’t get me wrong Google joined late and the fastest growing among those three. But there is no fault in trying harder. It benefits the end user. Also as per CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince free tier is the biggest selling point for a cloud service. When a nerd falls in love with the free tier, and later joins or create a big corporation he starts using the pro tier of the free service he used to love. Also free users create so much data, it helps protect premium customer’s data better.
So to conclude, this is really a nice move from google cloud. Now hopefully more and more people will start using GCP. Yeah I will of course take the advantage. Anyway comment down below your thoughts about this change, if you found it helpful share it with your friends who might not know it yet. Thanks for reading The SmartGoat Blog
