Is f1-micro VM machine type forever free?

Question

When I try to create an f1-micro package, below the month fees appears this message:

Your first 720 hours of f1-micro instance usage are free this month.

Currently is November, which has 30 days. 720 divided by 30 is 24 hours. It appears as the f1-micro package is for free the whole month.

I tried looking up for some information online, but I wasn't able to find any helpful information. It looks like the f1-micro is always free for the first month. Now, the question is, if the f1-micro will be for free even after this period. Have anyone some experience with this?

Answer 1

UPDATE（Aug, 2021）: From Augest 1st, 2021, the Free Tier F1-micro VM is changing to the E2-micro VM as the VM to use for free. On August 1, 2021, E2-micro Free Tier will be introduced. Follow these steps to change your machine type to E2-micro to avoid incurring charges for continuing to use F1-micro after August 31, 2021.

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Yes, a single f1-micro instance falls within the "Always Free Tier" and will be free for the entire month (the number of hours adjusts per month), as long as it is in one of the allowed regions (As of this writing, that means us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1). Also note that the disk image for this instance will also be free, as long as it is 30GB or less and not SSD.

This program is not limited to the current month -- it renews every month (though of course the # of hours are slightly different each month). At least, until Google changes the terms of the program :)

Additionally, when GCP starts charging for external IP addresses at the beginning of 2020, a single external IP address, as long as it is in use, will also be free for the entire month.

It is important to note that the always free tier is not set up as "1 instance" it is set up as a number of instance hours (or instance months, or ip-address-months). So, you could run 3 instances concurrently for a third of a month as well (as long as they each only had no more than a 30GB disk attached each -- the limit of total disk usage is 30GB-months).

Finally, while some services (such as certain click to deploy Cloud Platform marketplace solutions) directly consume GCE resources and therefore are able to benefit from the GCE free tier, others do not, even though they specify instance types. For example, a micro Cloud SQL instance will not be within the free tier. GKE also cannot operate fully in free tier, as Google no longer supports f1-micro node pools for GKE.