Google Cloud Run functions
Event-driven serverless functions on Google Cloud (formerly Cloud Functions) with a perpetual monthly free tier.
- Card required
- Yes
Google Cloud Run functions scores 6.2/10 for free value in Functions. The main constraint: Perpetual monthly free tier of 2,000,000 invocations, 400,000 GB-seconds, 200,000 GHz-seconds of compute, and 5 GB of outbound internet data transfer, shared across all functions in the billing account.
Free value score
6.2 / 10Show the math
Key metrics
What you get
Perpetual (non-expiring) free tier that renews every month, not a one-time trial
2,000,000 invocations plus 400,000 GB-seconds and 200,000 GHz-seconds of compute free per month
Native triggers for Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Firestore, and HTTP, with auto-scaling to zero
Free tier is a dollar-equivalent allowance applied account-wide across all functions
Gotchas
- Billing account required
A valid billing account with a payment method is required even to use the free tier.
- Monthly free allowance
Free tier of 2M invocations, 400,000 GB-seconds, 200,000 GHz-seconds, and 5 GB egress resets each calendar month.
- 2M invocations/month
First 2 million invocations per month are free; beyond that they are billed at $0.40 per million.
- 400K GB-seconds compute
400,000 GB-seconds of memory-time free per month; excess billed at $0.0000025 per GB-second.
- 200K GHz-seconds compute
200,000 GHz-seconds of CPU-time free per month; excess billed at $0.0000100 per GHz-second.
- 5 GB egress/month
5 GB of outbound internet data transfer free per month; excess billed at $0.12 per GB. Inbound and intra-region Google API traffic is free.
- Image build/storage not free
Free tier excludes Cloud Build, Container Registry, and Artifact Registry charges for building and storing function images; small storage charges accrue beyond their own free tiers.
- 540s max timeout
1st gen functions have a maximum execution timeout of 540 seconds (9 minutes); long-running event-driven functions are terminated at this limit.
- No concurrency (1st gen)
1st gen functions handle one request per instance with no concurrency support; concurrent traffic requires more instances (use 2nd gen / Cloud Run for concurrency).
- Cold starts
Functions scale to zero when idle, so the first invocation after idle incurs cold-start latency unless minimum instances (billed as idle time) are configured.
Sources
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"In addition to the 2 million invocations, the free tier provides 400,000 GB-seconds, 200,000 GHz-seconds of compute time and 5GB of Internet data transfer out per month."
https://cloud.google.com/functions/pricing-1stgen -
"Cloud Run functions (1st gen) provides a perpetual free tier for compute-time resources, which includes an allocation of both GB-seconds and GHz-seconds."
https://cloud.google.com/functions/pricing-1stgen -
"Free tier (based on us-central1 active pricing): CPU - First 180,000 vCPU-seconds free per month; RAM - First 360,000 GiB-seconds free per month; Requests - 2 million requests free per month"
https://cloud.google.com/run/pricing -
"The free tier usage is aggregated across projects by billing account and resets every month; you are billed only for usage past the free tier."
https://cloud.google.com/run/pricing
