Google Cloud Platform Free Tier
To be clear, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) has offered "always" free tiers on a lot of their services for a long time now.  I assume there must be diffs here, or else this is just a PR move to remind devs that GCP has free tiers.<p>I do want to express my gratitude to GCP for their free tiers.  It has enabled me to offer a various online tools to help some of my teacher friends.  It makes it easy to just throw together an app like I normally do, but not incur the costs for these lightweight situations.  The alternative is to spend my time finding ways to run and manage the stuff for free using local servers or something, which is usually more pain than the simple tools are worth.<p>The free tiers are also one of the reasons I tend to throw all my hobby projects at GCP instead of AWS.  GCP services also tend to be easier to use than the equivalent AWS services.  Mostly because GCP has a lot less to customize.  That's both good and bad, but for hobby projects it comes out net-good.<p>AppEngine is also amazing, if your workload can fit within its limitations.  Again, for me it's about reducing hassle so I can focus on tinkering with ideas and projects, which is what AppEngine lets me do.<p>All that good stuff said, I would _never_ recommend GCP for big projects, companies, etc.  The platform is rife with instabilities, bugs, backwards incompatible changes, etc.  This is from personal experience running a service at a small company, and from my friend's experience running a huge service at a large company.<p>EDIT: I should mention one of my biggest pain points for the way I currently use GCP (as a way to quickly prototype ideas and projects).  Databases.  There's no free tier on Cloud SQL.  Without a free tier it's something like $10-$20/month to run a managed SQL server.  So I end up doing everything with Datastore, which is their NoSQL offering.  What a huge pain to munge all my data patterns to fit within the limitations of NoSQL.  I really wish there was a similarly pay-as-you-go alternative but with real relational queries.  Or, you know, a free tier on Cloud SQL... :)