I see "free trial" when I signed up...still not sure what free tier is...
This is in addition to the time-limited free trial credit, and the free quota applies before any payment (including from the trial credit).
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/always-free-usage-limits
They are (IMO) quite generous. Definitely sufficient to get a good feel for the platform and run some personal workloads.
Disclaimer: Nothing to do with this launch, but I do work on GCP.
So it's unclear what I'm signing up for...and I need a credit card so Google can confirm I'm not a bot? I have the same problem with using the Cloud platform...I have to search google to find anything like the firewall/networking/billing etc...