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Google Cloud external passthrough Network Load Balancer

cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/networkL4 passthrough load balancer (regional)egress/gcp-passthrough-nlbJSON compare report an error provider JSON

Free allowance: No free tier is stated for the load balancer.
Verdict: paidno free allowance; listed for its price
Cost: no price statedsee Price below
Identity: cardcard required, no phone
Binding limit: write-gatedbackends must be instance groups or zonal NEGs in the same region and project as the load balancer
Evidence: documented2 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
Freshness: stale on 2026-11-23checked 2026-10-23 (live); stale on 2026-11-23

Free tier	No free tier is stated for the load balancer. Backends must be instance groups or NEGs: These backends must be in the same region and project. unit none; metered on none
Price	unverified
Limits	write-gated (binding) backends must be instance groups or zonal NEGs in the same region and project as the load balancer source
Binding	write-gated At 1 TiB/month the first thing that stops a user is not a byte count but the backend requirement: the service must already run in the same GCP project and region, which means the origin already has a public address of its own.
Identity	card A Google Cloud project with billing enabled; the free trial credit is a credit, not a free tier for this product.
Egress	No byte allowance: a forwarding rule is billed hourly and the traffic is billed at Cloud egress rates. The price page could not be read - its extraction returned an unrelated domain-price table.; ingress: tcp+udp free allowance: none published
Interface	rest, cli a forwarding rule selects address, protocol and ports and points at one regional backend service
Tooling	gcloud, the API or the console; a forwarding rule plus a backend service and health check
Composes with	only with a GCP backend, so it chains with a free GCP e2-micro but that VM already has a public IP
Reliability	none recorded
Notes	UDP is documented and the address can be Premium Tier, which is anycast to the nearest region. It still adds no reachability a GCP VM's own external IP does not already provide, and it is regional rather than global for L4. Hybrid NEGs can point at on-premises hosts through Cloud VPN or Interconnect, which is a route but not a cheap one.
Evidence note	documented The protocol list and the backend constraint are quoted from the page read. The price is unverified because the pricing page extraction failed, so the record cannot support a cost claim.
Parsed numbers	has-free-tier 0

Evidence 2

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-23	cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/network	Backend service-based regional external passthrough Network Load Balancers can load-balance TCP, UDP, ESP, GRE, ICMP, and ICMPv6 traffic.
2026-10-23	cloud.google.com/load-balancing/docs/network	These backends must be in the same region and project but can be in different VPC networks.

More fields 6

wg path	inside-udp
wg detail	The backend service forwards TCP, UDP, ESP, GRE, ICMP and ICMPv6, so a WireGuard datagram reaches a GCE backend on the forwarding rule's port.
ingress	tcp+udp
volume stated	No byte allowance: a forwarding rule is billed hourly and the traffic is billed at Cloud egress rates. The price page could not be read - its extraction returned an unrelated domain-price table.
bytes transit	yes
transit note	Google's network carries the bytes to the backend

Unknown values 2

per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer