Last updated: 11 September 2026. Checked against Google Cloud's own program, trial and pricing pages that day.
Google Cloud gives free credits three ways in 2026:
- The $300 Free Trial for new customers: 90 days, a card at signup. It can no longer pay for the Gemini API in AI Studio or for partner models such as Claude.
- The Always Free tier: monthly allowances on 20+ products with no end date, including one small VM, 5 GB of storage and 2 million Cloud Run requests.
- The Google for Startups Cloud Program: $2,000 at the Start tier for startups founded in the last 24 months, up to $200,000 at the Scale tier for companies with institutional funding, and up to $350,000 for AI startups.
There is no "pre-funded $2,000 that anyone can claim from the console". The $2,000 is the Start tier, and you apply for it. The April version of this page said otherwise, and its Start and Scale amounts were wrong too.
Every free Google Cloud route at a glance
| Route | What you get | Who qualifies | Card |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free Trial | $300 for 90 days | New Google Cloud customers | Yes |
| Always Free tier | Monthly free usage on 20+ products, no end date | Any billing account | Billing account |
| Start tier | $2,000, valid 12 months | Founded within 24 months, working MVP | Billing account |
| Scale tier | Up to $200,000 over 2 years | Pre-seed to Series A from an institutional investor, founded within 5 years | Billing account |
| Scale tier, AI startups | Up to $350,000 over 2 years | As Scale, with AI at the core of the product | Billing account |
| Research credits | $5,000 | Faculty, PhD students, postdocs | - |
The $300 Free Trial
"The Free Trial gets you a $300 Welcome credit to spend over 90 days on various Google Cloud products and you won't be billed." You need a card or other payment method at signup (in some countries a bank check too), and you qualify only if you have never been a paying Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform or Firebase customer and have not had the trial before.
What the $300 cannot pay for:
- The Gemini API in AI Studio. "The $300 credit can't pay for Gemini API in AI Studio costs." This applies to accounts opened after 2 March 2026. The same Gemini models on Vertex AI (now Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform) are covered. Details in Gemini Free Credits.
- Partner models offered as a managed API, such as Claude on Vertex AI.
While the account is still a free-trial billing account, you also cannot add GPUs to VMs, use Google Cloud Marketplace, request quota increases, run Windows Server VMs or mine cryptocurrency. Upgrading to a paid account lifts these limits and keeps any unused credit until 90 days from signup. If you do not upgrade, the trial account is closed when the 90 days pass or the $300 runs out, and its projects and resources are stopped.
The Always Free tier
Separate from the trial and with no end date, although Google can change it with 30 days' notice. The limits are per billing account, per month:
| Product | Free every month |
|---|---|
| Compute Engine | 1 e2-micro VM in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1; 30 GB standard disk; 1 GB egress from North America |
| Cloud Storage | 5 GB of regional storage in US regions; 5,000 Class A and 50,000 Class B operations |
| Cloud Run | 2 million requests; 180,000 vCPU-seconds and 360,000 GB-seconds |
| Cloud Run functions | 2 million invocations; 5 GB egress |
| BigQuery | 1 TiB of queries; 10 GiB of storage |
| Firestore | 1 GiB storage; 50,000 reads, 20,000 writes and 20,000 deletes per day |
| Cloud Build | 2,500 build-minutes on e2-standard-2 |
| Pub/Sub | 10 GiB of messages |
| Logging and Monitoring | 50 GiB of logs per project |
| Agent Runtime on Agent Platform | 50 vCPU-hours and 100 GiB-hours of RAM |
Source: Google Cloud's free program docs, 11 September 2026. Anything above the limits is billed at normal rates, so set a budget alert. For LLM calls, the separate Gemini API free tier in AI Studio needs no billing account at all.
Google for Startups Cloud Program
| Start | Scale | Scale, AI startups | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credits | $2,000 | Up to $200,000 | Up to $350,000 |
| How they are paid | Valid 12 months | Year 1: 100% of usage up to $100,000; year 2: 20% of spend, up to $100,000 more | Year 1: 100% up to $250,000; year 2: 20% of spend, up to $100,000 more |
| Company age | Founded within 24 months | Founded within 5 years | Founded within 5 years |
| Funding | Pre-funded, planning to raise | Pre-seed to Series A from an institutional investor | Same, and AI is "built into your startup's foundational structure" |
| Earlier credits | None beyond the free trial | No more than $5,000 | No more than $5,000 |
What counts as funding for Scale: equity from institutional investors and VC firms; SAFEs are eligible, and so are verifiable token raises. Private equity, government grants, prize money, crowdfunding, angels and friends and family do not qualify a startup for Scale, but Google says it will look at those companies for other tiers. Seed rounds must be within the last five years, a Series A within the last twelve months.
How year 2 works: it is not a second grant. Google credits back 20% of what you spend, up to $100,000, so reaching the full $100,000 means spending $500,000 on Google Cloud that year. For most startups the real value of the program is year 1.
What the credits cover: Google Cloud services and select Google offerings, including Google's own models: "Program credits cover Google's state-of-the-art models like Gemini and Gemma. Note: Third-party models are billed directly and are not covered." The credits cannot pay for Marketplace offerings. Program credits also apply to the Gemini API, once you have made the minimum $5 Gemini prepayment.
Other benefits:
- Start: $200 in Google Skills credits, 12 months of Google Workspace Business Plus, free-tier AI Studio access.
- Scale: $12,000 in Enhanced Support credits, Workspace, and Google Maps Platform credit.
- Partner perks: $1,000 in OpenRouter credits for Google models (valid 6 months), a year of Datadog Pro, GitLab Ultimate for a year, and 33 million ElevenLabs credits, among others.
Who is excluded: Google may not accept companies that have gone public or been acquired, educational institutions, government bodies and nonprofits.
How to apply
- Set up a Google Cloud billing account. The form asks for its 18-character ID; the credits land there.
- Use an email on your company's domain. Google's FAQ asks that the business email match your startup's public website domain.
- For Scale, have public proof of funding ready: links to announcements or databases showing the investment. Companies in stealth mode need to verify funding another way.
- Apply at cloud.google.com/startup. Google matches you to a tier based on stage; you do not pick one.
Google's own sites disagree on one detail: startup.google.com still says companies can be up to 5 years old (10 for Scale), while the program pages on cloud.google.com give 24 months for Start and 5 years for Scale. Go by cloud.google.com, the newer of the two.
Other Google routes
- Research credits: "Apply for $5,000 in research credits" for faculty, PhD students and postdocs in eligible countries, valid one year.
- Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers get monthly Google Developer Program credits for Cloud services: $10 with AI Pro, $40 with AI Ultra 5x, $100 with AI Ultra 20x.
- Vertex AI express mode: 90 days of free Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform use within quotas, without a billing account, for new users with a @gmail.com address.
- Google for Startups Accelerator: no fixed credit amount; accelerator startups can apply for Cloud credits case by case, plus Cloud TPU access.
Google vs AWS vs Microsoft for a bootstrapped founder
| Google Cloud | AWS | Microsoft Azure | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Without an investor | $2,000 (Start tier) | $1,000 to $5,000 (Activate Founders) | $1,000, then $4,000 after business verification |
| With institutional funding | Up to $200,000, or $350,000 for AI | Up to $200,000 through an Activate provider | Usually $100,000 to start, up to $150,000 |
| Frontier models the credits pay for | Gemini and Gemma | Claude and others on Bedrock | OpenAI models on Azure |
The three programs are independent, so applying to all of them is normal. Which one matters most usually comes down to the model you build on: startup credits pay for Gemini on Google, for Claude through Bedrock on AWS (Claude for Startups), and for OpenAI models on Azure (OpenAI Free Credits).
What changed since this page's April version
| April version said | September 2026 |
|---|---|
| "Pre-funded" $2,000 anyone can claim in the console | The $2,000 is the Start tier; you apply for it |
| Start tier $2,000 to $20,000, under 5 years, under $5M raised | $2,000, founded within 24 months, working MVP |
| Scale tier $25,000 to $100,000 | Up to $200,000 over two years |
| AI-first bonus of $10,000 for Model Garden partner models | Third-party models are not covered by program credits |
| $300 trial covers Gemini API and Vertex AI | Not the Gemini API in AI Studio since March 2026; Vertex yes |
| (not covered) | Always Free tier limits, express mode, Developer Program credits |
Frequently asked questions
How much free Google Cloud credit can I get? New customers get a $300 Free Trial for 90 days. Startups can apply to the Google for Startups Cloud Program: $2,000 at the Start tier for companies founded in the last 24 months, up to $200,000 at the Scale tier for companies with institutional funding, and up to $350,000 for AI startups. The Always Free tier adds monthly free usage on more than 20 products with no end date.
Do I need an investor for Google for Startups? Not for the Start tier, which gives $2,000 to startups founded within the last 24 months with a working MVP. The Scale tier, up to $200,000 or $350,000 for AI startups, requires pre-seed to Series A funding from an institutional investor; SAFEs count, but angel money, grants and crowdfunding do not.
Can I use the $300 Google Cloud free trial for the Gemini API? Not in AI Studio if your account was opened after 2 March 2026: Google excludes Gemini API costs from the trial credit. You can use it for Gemini on Vertex AI, now Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, which serves the same models. The trial also cannot pay for partner models such as Claude.
Do Google for Startups credits cover Claude or other third-party models? No. Google says program credits cover its own models such as Gemini and Gemma, and that third-party models are billed directly. Marketplace offerings are excluded too. For Claude, AWS Activate credits can pay for it on Amazon Bedrock.
How does the second year of Google for Startups Scale credits work? Year 2 is a 20% credit on what you spend on Google Cloud, capped at $100,000. To receive the full $100,000 you would need to spend $500,000 that year, so the first-year credit (up to $100,000, or $250,000 for AI startups) is where most of the value is.
What is in the Google Cloud Always Free tier? Among others: one e2-micro VM in a US region, 30 GB of standard disk, 5 GB of Cloud Storage, 2 million Cloud Run requests, 1 TiB of BigQuery queries and 10 GiB of storage, and Firestore with 50,000 reads a day. The limits are monthly, per billing account, and have no end date.
Related guides
- Gemini Free Credits 2026: Free Tier, $300 Trial, Startups
- Free LLM APIs 2026 - every free tier checked, which need no card
- Claude for Startups Program 2026 - who qualifies, how to apply
- OpenAI Free Credits 2026: Startup Credits, Codex, Azure
- AWS Activate Credits - tiers and how to apply
- Microsoft for Startups - Azure credits and what they cover
- Free Cloud Credits for Developers - every cloud provider compared
- Free Startup Credits 2026: Complete Guide
- Free GPU Compute - when you need raw GPU
Got accepted to Google for Startups? Tell me your tier and how long the decision took. I update this guide with what founders actually see.
