Google Cloud Spot
- Free allowance
- Google publishes two numbers that answer the survival question directly and neither is an interruption rate.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- no price stated
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- noneno named constraint binds
- Evidence
- documented15 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-03checked 2026-11-02 (live); stale on 2026-12-03
| Free tier | Google publishes two numbers that answer the survival question directly and neither is an interruption rate. Estimated uptime is 'the minimum amount of time that you can expect most of your Spot VMs to run before Compute Engine preempts them', and it is bucketed into exactly three values: '60 minutes (3,600 seconds)', '10 minutes (600 seconds)' and '1 minute (60 seconds)'. Obtainability is a separate score from 0.0 to 1.0 for whether the creation request succeeds at all. The preemption rate from advice.capacityHistory is defined as 'Total preempted Spot VMs in a day' divided by 'Total Spot VMs that stopped running in a day'. unit hours; metered on wall-clock; none |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Binding | none Estimated uptime is bucketed to three values and is a floor for the majority of VMs, so it cannot be converted into a per-hour probability without assuming a distribution. |
| Identity | card card: 'the Free Trial is USD 300 over 90 days and requires a credit card or other payment method at signup'. Google submits an authorisation request that is 'a hold, not an actual charge', with 'a value between $0.00 and $1.00 USD', typically released within a few days to a month. 'Prepaid cards aren't accepted for payment'; a debit card with a Visa or MasterCard logo is accepted but a debit card that requires two-factor authentication is not, and virtual cards 'may not be accepted'. Spot VMs sit outside the Free Tier - 'The Google Cloud Free Tier credits for Compute Engine don't apply to Spot VMs' - and a non-billable Free trial account cannot add GPUs or request a quota increase. |
| Egress | not stated |
| Interface | unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed |
| Tooling | not stated |
| Composes with | Estimated uptime is the one vendor-published figure a scheduler can gate on before launching: if it returns 10 minutes and the checkpoint interval is 10 minutes, is not worth the setup cost and the scheduler should move zone. |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | The comparability trap is the denominator. A GCP preemption rate of 0.50 does not mean a VM has a 50 per cent chance of preemption in an hour; it means half of the VMs that stopped that day were stopped by preemption rather than by their owner. Published third-party tables that put 'GCP ~2.3 per cent per hour' next to an Azure per-hour eviction probability are mixing two statistics. Also of note: preemption history is unavailable for N1 machine types with GPUs attached, which is exactly the cheap GPU lane, and the whole feature is marked Preview. fails-identity via a05-spot. The one recorded is the better-evidenced. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 15
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/view-vm-availability | estimated uptime is 'the minimum amount of time that you can expect most of your Spot VMs to run' and takes only the values 60 minutes, 10 minutes or 1 minute, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/view-spot-preemption | the preemption rate formula is total preempted Spot VMs in a day divided by total Spot VMs that stopped running in a day, and the rate is expressed as a fraction of VMs rather than of time, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/view-spot-preemption | preemption history covers 30 days per machine type and zone, and the feature cannot report N1 machine types with GPUs attached, custom machine types or TPUs |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/spot | the preemption notice duration can be set to 120 seconds or 0 seconds, 120 is recommended for workloads needing more than 30 seconds, and the shutdown period is best effort up to 30 seconds, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/create-use-spot | the gcloud flag is --preemption-notice-duration and the value must be either 120s or 0s, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/spot | 'The Google Cloud Free Tier credits for Compute Engine don't apply to Spot VMs', quoted in the Spot VMs limitations list |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features | on a non-billable Free trial account you cannot 'Add GPUs to your VM instances' and cannot 'Request a quota increase', quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features | the Free Trial is USD 300 over 90 days and requires a credit card or other payment method at signup, quoted |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/spot-vms/pricing | the accelerator table lists 'Current Spot pricing (USD)' per machine type, including a2-highgpu-1g at $2.20401, a3-highgpu-1g at $6.273932575 and g2-standard-4 at $0.423016, all for 1 hour |
| 2026-10-22 | cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/spot | Spot VMs offer 'up to 91% discounts for many machine types, GPUs, TPUs, and Local SSDs', and 'The Google Cloud Free Tier credits for Compute Engine don't apply to Spot VMs', quoted |
| 2026-11-02 | cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features | the signup authorisation is a hold and not a charge |
| 2026-11-02 | cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features | the published hold is between USD 0.00 and USD 1.00 |
| 2026-11-02 | cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/payment-methods | prepaid cards are refused outright |
| 2026-11-02 | cloud.google.com/support/docs/troubleshoot-signup | virtual cards may be refused, and are not listed as supported |
| 2026-11-02 | cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/payment-methods | a debit card is accepted except when it requires two-factor authentication |
More fields 2
| facets | {"class": "spot-arbitrage","free_tier_kind": "none","shape": null} |
|---|---|
| payment methods | {"card_at_signup": "yes","debit": "accepted-with-condition","prepaid": "refused","virtual": "may be refused","hold_amount": "USD 0.00 to USD 1.00","hold_detail": "'The authorization request is a hold, not an actual charge. No funds are withdrawn by Google', with 'a value between $0.00 and $1.00 USD', 'typically released within a few days to a month'. A debit card with a Visa or MasterCard logo is accepted; a debit card that requires two-factor authentication is refused. 'Prepaid cards aren't accepted for payment.'","identity": "a card or another payment method at signup; the account is charged only for usage beyond the credit","source_url": "https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/free-cloud-features","read_on": "2026-11-02"} |
Unknown values 7
- egress metered: egress metering was not published
- egress terms: a source was read and is silent on this field
- interface: the access interface was not established
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed
- retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- tooling: a source was read and is silent on this field