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Guide to Free Tiers from Best Cloud Providers: Google, AWS, Azure & More

Jayasurya Mailsamy

Jayasurya Mailsamy

— 2 min read

Here’s a lighthearted look at the “Cloud Smorgasbord” of offerings by major providers and some of the handy free-tier perks they each provide to get you started without breaking the bank!

Google Cloud Platform: “The Mountain of Free Quotas”

  • App Engine lets you run frontend and backend apps, covering 28 frontend and 9 backend instance hours per day.
  • For scalable databases, Cloud Firestore offers 1GB of storage and free transactions up to 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes, and 20,000 deletes every day! Explore Firestore Free.
  • Compute Engine gifts a non-preemptible e2-micro instance, 30GB HDD, and 1GB network egress per month—ideal for mini-projects. Compute for Free.
  • If you need to store files, Cloud Storage grants 5GB storage with 1GB egress for all your data whims.

Pro-tip: To play around in the cloud, Google’s Cloud Shell (a web-based Linux shell) gives 60 hours of access per week.

Amazon Web Services (AWS): “The Free Jungle of Choices”

  • CloudFront has 1TB of egress and up to 2 million Function invocations monthly. Perfect for testing your CDN and streaming setups.
  • EC2 offers 750 hours of t2.micro or t3.micro instances each month for the first year (yes, you read that right—12 months of free compute time).
  • RDS lets you run a db.t2.micro instance for 750 hours/month for an entire year.
  • Data storage essentials like S3 come with 5GB for free, plus 20K GET and 2K PUT requests each month. Amazon Free Tier.

Fun fact: AWS’s SNS allows 1 million publishes monthly, so your notification game can be on point for no charge.

Microsoft Azure: “Where Code Meets Cloud—Free Trials Included”

  • Virtual Machines give you both Linux and Windows VMs (one B1S each) for an entire year!
  • Azure Functions gives 1 million executions per month, making it a great playground for serverless code.
  • Need databases? Cosmos DB provides 25GB of storage and 1000 RUs of provisioned throughput, enough to house many demo projects.
  • Azure DevOps offers 5 active users, unlimited private Git repos, and Azure Pipelines with free parallel jobs for open-source projects. Azure Free Tier.

With Static Web Apps, you can host a secure, static site with free SSL and custom domain support—perfect for portfolios or landing pages.

Oracle Cloud: “The Unexpected Cloud Contender”

  • Compute gives two VMs based on AMD processors and up to 4 ARM cores. Choose between one powerhouse VM or up to four smaller ones—your choice!
  • Object Storage provides 10GB to store your files without the hassle of managing servers.
  • Bandwidth comes in a hefty 10TB egress, great for developers with large data needs. Oracle Free Tier.

Oracle might surprise you: its Databases offer two instances with 20GB each, letting you explore SQL without restrictions.

IBM Cloud: “A Surprisingly Generous Cloud”

  • Object Storage lets you stash up to 25GB per month at no cost.
  • Db2 and Cloudant database offer 100MB and 1GB of data storage, respectively, perfect for small data projects.
  • API Connect permits 50,000 API calls each month, letting you flex your API-building muscles. IBM Cloud Free Tier.

The Availability Monitoring feature with 3 million data points/month means you can keep track of your apps without constant refreshes.

Cloudflare: “Keeping Your Site Fast and Safe for Free”

  • Application Services like DNS, DDoS protection, and SSL are all free, including Firewall and Bot Mitigation.
  • Workers let you deploy serverless functions globally, with 100k requests per day for free.
  • With Pages, you can deploy up to 100 custom domains and enjoy integrated SSL for free. Cloudflare Free.

TURN provides 1TB of outgoing traffic monthly to keep your WebRTC apps smooth for users around the world.

Each cloud provider’s free tier is different, catering to diverse developer needs, from small-time data storage to production-level application hosting. So go ahead, pick your cloud, test some code, and see where you can take advantage of these free resources!

Source: Free for Developer