Why It's Great

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) offers one of the most developer-friendly free tiers, perfect for hosting everything from static sites to containerized applications and databases.

Key Free Tier Features

💻 Compute & App Hosting

• Cloud Run: 2 million requests/month, 180,000 vCPU-seconds, 360,000 GB-seconds memory.
• Compute Engine: 1 e2-micro instance (US regions), 30GB HDD.
• App Engine: 28 frontend instance hours/day (effectively free for one instance).
• Kubernetes (GKE): No cluster management fee for one zonal cluster.

🗄️ Storage & Database

• Cloud Storage: 5GB Standard storage.
• Firestore: 1GB storage, 50k reads/day.
• BigQuery: 1TB querying/month, 10GB storage.

🛠️ Developer Tools

• Cloud Build: 120 build-minutes/day.
• Cloud Shell: Free ephemeral Linux shell with 5GB persistent disk.
• Project IDX: Online VSCode-based development environment (formerly Firebase Studio).

Limitations

• Egress limits apply (typically 1GB to non-Google destinations).
• Compute instances are restricted to specific regions (e.g., us-west1, us-central1).