Google Cloud Storage Always Free tier
- 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
- card?placeholder, not evidence; card unknown, phone unknown
- 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 |
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. |
| Identity | card (inferred, not read) 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 |
|
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 4
- 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