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Comment by geoka9 | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for being off-topic: can you guys consider introducing something similar to AWS's free tier? It doesn't have to have a lot free resources but it should be lengthy (6+ months, ideally at least 1 year). I recently started a new project, and while I'd prefer to use GC, I had to go with AWS because they offer one year for free (and GC's 2 months is not nearly enough to validate an idea).

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That's valid feedback. GCP's free tier is more valuable and more flexible than AWS, but only for 2 months instead of 12.

There are also perpetual free tiers for several GCP services - AppEngine, BigQuery, Firebase.

No comments on your specific feedback, but please do join GCP NEXT March 8-10 for some exciting updates [0].

(Work on Google Cloud, NOT in marketing :))

[0] https://cloudnext.withgoogle.com/

Cloud Datastore has a perpetual free tier, too: https://cloud.google.com/datastore/ :)

(I work on it.)

Thanks, I forgot.. there are probably others I'm missing :/

no livestream?

they should have one up closer to the date.

The tricky part of a 2 month free trial is that it's not nearly enough time to explore the offerings unless you're a company that's already got a product ready to go and staff to migrate it full-time (and I assume the latter is exactly who you'd want to charge full price to). I took advantage of the 2-month GCP free trial, and ended up using 1 GCE instance, 2 Cloud Storage buckets, your cloud storage webhosting & DNS, and....that's it. I don't even really know what other services exist. It takes time to program things...by the time you get around to realizing that there are other GCP services that may help your project, the trial's already over.

Since there's a dollar cap as well, I don't see the problem with extending the trial out to a long calendar time-period.

Anyway to get a discounted Cloud Next ticket? I'm here in San Francisco, but even the $549 (one-day) is out of budget. Would really love to go. I am a GCP user and have a ops/devops consultancy startup (https://elasticbyte.net).

You should really reevaluate whether you should use an entire 6 months to validate an idea. That's a lot of sunk time.

To each her own! The most common issue is that you have some idea you start working on (T=0), put it away for a while (T=3 months), and come back to realize your free trial has expired. Alternatively, if you're just tinkering in the background or on weekends, 60 days is suddenly just 9 weekends.

What if you have one idea, and then another one 6 months later?

A product like ours (ML based medtech) takes a lot longer than 6 months to validate - and we make extensive use of GPUs (both AWS and Google)

Ideally perpetual free tiers are the best, especially their usage becomes a rounding error.

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