The AWS Free Tier is no longer a 12-month trial for new accounts. AWS now gives new customers a Free plan worth up to $200 in credits over six months, part of a redesigned getting-started experience, and it stops the account instead of sending a bill when the six months or the credits run out. Azure still pairs a $200 credit for 30 days with a shelf of 12-month services. Google Cloud runs its own program built around always-free products.
That split matters if you are picking a cloud to learn on, prototype on, or park a side project on. The three offers reward different habits. One protects beginners from bills, one hands out generous starter quotas for a month, and one lets small workloads run for free indefinitely if they stay under the limits. This cloud free tier comparison uses the providers’ own pages as they stood on November 5, 2026. Where a page leaves a number unconfirmed, we say so instead of guessing.
The short version: AWS wins for guardrails, Azure wins for breadth of starter services, and Google Cloud wins for long-lived hobby workloads. If you want the paid-tier picture after the trial ends, our full AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud comparison covers it. This article stays focused on what you get for $0.
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The Short Answer: Which Cloud Free Tier Wins in November 2026
Start with the question that decides most cases: what happens when the free period ends? On the AWS Free plan, usage stops automatically once six months pass or the credits are exhausted. Nothing bills you unless you upgrade to the Paid plan or switch on a paid-only service. That is the safest default we found among the three, and it is the reason AWS earns our pick for first-time cloud users.
Azure answers a different question. Its free account offers $200 in credit for up to 30 days, plus limited quantities of selected services for 12 months and a set of always-free services. A month is short, but the 12-month services give you a longer runway for databases, web apps and storage than the credit alone suggests. Teams that already live in the Microsoft ecosystem will feel at home.
Google Cloud advertises 20+ always-free products. That is the strongest signal for anyone who wants a small bot, a hobby API or a tiny database to keep running without a recurring charge. Google’s introductory credit is where our verification ran thin, so we flag it below and tell you where to double-check before you sign up.
- Best for beginners who fear surprise bills: AWS Free plan, because usage stops instead of billing.
- Best for a one-month proof of concept: Azure free account, because of the $200 credit and the 12-month service shelf.
- Best for a workload that should stay free: Google Cloud, because of its 20+ always-free products.
- Best first serverless project: any of the three, though our walkthrough on how to deploy AWS SAM apps shows the AWS route step by step.
None of the three is a free lunch forever. Each one has a boundary, and the costly mistakes happen right at that boundary. The rest of this guide maps those boundaries so you can plan around them.
What Changed in the AWS Free Tier This Autumn
AWS rebuilt its entry offer in the last few weeks. The company announced a redesigned onboarding flow in the autumn of 2026, and the new sign-up experience and revised credit system went live in October 2026. Most new customers no longer need a credit card to start, and they receive $100 in initial credits. They can earn up to $100 more by completing introductory activities, which brings the ceiling to $200.
The vocabulary changed too. AWS now talks about a Free plan and a Paid plan. The older idea of the Free Tier as one broad introductory allowance has been replaced for new accounts. The Free plan costs $0, gives access to selected services rather than the full catalog, and ends six months after account creation or when credits run out, whichever comes first. Credits expire six months after creation and cannot be extended.
The old shorthand of “12 months free” is out of date for anyone opening a new account today. AWS pages now emphasize six months and up to $200 instead. Always Free offers continue alongside the credit program, and AWS says they work independently of it. If you opened your account before the October launch, check the Credits page in the Billing and Cost Management console. AWS says older accounts may need it to see expiration information.
Two more changes landed on October 19, 2026. AWS announced that new customers can apply Free Tier credits across SageMaker AI, including endpoint deployments, model customization, Studio notebooks and model training. It also described Amazon EC2 T8i instances as the newest burstable generation, with up to 30% better price performance than T3 and up to 70% higher compute performance. According to AWS, the t8i.micro and t8i.small sizes are eligible for Free Tier usage.
AWS’s own marketing line sums up the pitch. The company tells new customers, “You’ll only pay when you’re ready to grow.” Whether that holds depends on how carefully you watch your usage, which we cover in the charge-avoidance section.
Side-by-Side Specs: AWS Free Tier vs Azure Free Account vs Google Cloud
The table below lines up the three offers across twelve attributes. We included only figures that appear on the providers’ own pages or in official announcements. Cells that say “not confirmed” mean the sources we checked today did not state the figure, so we left it out rather than fill it from memory.
| Attribute | AWS Free Tier | Azure free account | Google Cloud free program |
|---|---|---|---|
| Current plan names | Free plan and Paid plan | Azure free account, offered beside pay-as-you-go | Google Cloud Free Tier and Free Program |
| Introductory credit | Up to $200 ($100 at sign-up plus up to $100 for activities) | $200 | Not confirmed on a fetched official page, see text |
| Credit window | Six months | Up to 30 days | Not confirmed |
| Services in the intro offer | More than 90 selected services (some AWS pages say 100+) | Full catalog up to free amounts and the $200 credit | Not confirmed |
| Always-free products | Yes, with monthly limits per service | Yes, some always-free services | 20+ always-free products |
| 12-month services | No, replaced by credits for new accounts | Yes, limited quantities of selected services | Not confirmed |
| Plan price | Free plan $0, Paid plan has no fixed subscription price | $0 for the free-account period | $0 within free limits |
| What happens at the end | Usage stops at six months or when credits run out, upgrade to Paid plan to continue | Covered in Microsoft’s FAQ, read it before sign-up | Pay-as-you-go beyond free limits |
| Spend controls | Paid-plan monthly spend limit starting at $20 | Cost Management guidance on avoiding free-account charges | Budgets with spend caps, see text |
| Card at sign-up | Most new customers do not need one | A temporary $1 authorization may appear and then reverse | Varies by path, see text |
| Eligibility limits | New AWS customers only | One account with free services and $200 credit per new customer, sovereign regions excluded | Not confirmed |
| Data after expiry | Account data retained for 90 days after the Free plan expires | Not confirmed | Not confirmed |
| Serverless allowance | Lambda among eligible services, limits vary | Functions grant of up to 1,000,000 executions a month | Cloud Run, see text |
Two patterns stand out. First, AWS is the only provider here that built its entire intro offer around a hard stop. Second, Azure’s allowance table is the most specific, since Microsoft publishes exact quantities for individual services. Google’s strength is the always-free list, not the starter credit.
AWS Free Tier in Detail: Free Plan, Paid Plan and Credits
How the Free plan and Paid plan differ
The Free plan is the default for new customers. It costs $0, includes up to $200 in credits and opens more than 90 selected services for up to six months. AWS pages disagree slightly on the service count, because the Free Tier page says more than 90 while a getting-started page says 100+. Treat the number as roughly 90 to 100 and check the service you care about before you plan around it.
The Paid plan gives full access to AWS services under pay-as-you-go billing. AWS publishes no single monthly price for it, because charges depend on the service and the usage. New customers who start on the Paid plan are also eligible for up to $200 in credits. The one fixed number to remember is the spend limit. AWS announced that customers moving to the Paid plan can set a project-level monthly limit starting at $20. That figure is a ceiling on usage, not a subscription fee.
What the credits cover
AWS reportedly lists Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda and Amazon Bedrock among the services reachable through the new experience, though eligibility and limits vary by service. The SageMaker AI expansion on October 19 matters for machine learning learners, since training and endpoint costs can burn through $200 quickly. The T8i micro and small sizes give you a current-generation burstable instance on the free side.
Credits are not a license to experiment blindly. A Kubernetes cluster, a large database or an always-on GPU endpoint can consume a trial budget in days. If you plan to try containers, read our guide to setting up Amazon EKS first and price the cluster against your credit balance before you launch anything.
AWS also retains account data for 90 days after the Free plan expires. That grace period is useful, but do not treat it as a backup strategy. Export anything you care about before the six-month mark, because usage on the Free plan stops automatically and you will need to upgrade to the Paid plan to resume work.
One more detail for learners. AWS runs a free learning platform called Skill Builder that it recommends for cloud beginners. It sits outside the credit program, so it costs nothing and does not touch your balance. Pair it with the Free plan if you want structured practice instead of poking around the console.
Azure Free Account in Detail: $200 for 30 Days Plus 12-Month Services
Microsoft’s free-account page opens with a one-line pitch: “Get free services and a $200 credit to explore Azure for up to 30 days.” A Microsoft Learn question-and-answer reply dated November 2, 2026 describes the same structure: $200 for 30 days, limited quantities of selected services for 12 months, and some always-free services. Older articles that describe the offer as “$200 for one month” are incomplete, because they skip the 12-month and always-free layers.
The rules are tight in a few places. Microsoft limits each new customer to one account with free services and the $200 credit. The offer does not include sovereign cloud products in US Government, Azure China and Azure Germany regions. During sign-up verification, a temporary $1 authorization may appear on your card and then reverse. Azure is commercially available in 140 countries and regions.
Students get a separate path. Microsoft offers free developer tools and a $100 credit with no credit card required, and all you need is an academic email address. If you qualify, that route removes the card question entirely.
The service allowances are where Azure stands out. Microsoft lists exact quantities, which makes planning easier than on the other two platforms.
| Service area | Allowance listed by Microsoft |
|---|---|
| Speech and text | 0.5 million neural characters per month |
| Container registry | 1 Standard tier registry with 100 GB storage and 10 webhooks |
| Serverless SQL database | 100,000 vCore seconds per month with 32 GB of storage |
| Flexible Server database | 750 hours of Burstable B1MS instance, 32 GB storage and 32 GB backup storage |
| Web and API apps | Up to 10 apps with 1 GB storage and 1 hour per day |
| App bandwidth and domains | 100 GB bandwidth per subscription, 2 custom domains and 0.5 GB storage per app |
| Provisioned-throughput database | 1,000 request units per second with 25 GB storage |
| General Purpose database instance | 720 vCore hours of a 4-vCore or 8-vCore instance with 64 GB data and 64 GB backup storage |
| MongoDB | A dedicated cluster with 32 GB storage |
| File storage | 5 GB in Azure Files for 12 months |
| Functions | Monthly free grant of up to 1,000,000 executions |
Microsoft splits these between 12-month and always-free groups, so check its free-services page for which is which before you rely on a given line. The Functions grant carries a warning. Microsoft says the Linux Consumption hosting plan retires in September 2028 and recommends Flex Consumption. That is a future retirement, not a change in effect today, but new projects should start on Flex Consumption, Azure Container Apps, App Service or Premium, the hosting options Microsoft lists now.
Databases get the most generous treatment. If you are weighing managed database free offers across clouds, our comparison of AWS RDS, Azure Database and Google Cloud SQL shows how those services price once you leave the free quotas behind.
Google Cloud Free Tier in Detail: Always-Free Products and the Starter Path
Google Cloud’s confirmed headline is the always-free list. Its official material points to 20+ always-free products, though the pages we fetched do not enumerate every product or quota. Beyond the free limits, Google describes pay-as-you-go pricing with automatic savings and discounted rates for prepaid resources. That model rewards small workloads that never cross the free thresholds.
The introductory credit is where verification got harder. Google’s promotional material reportedly advertises $300 in free credits for new customers, but we could confirm that figure from only one source today, and the pages we fetched do not spell out its duration or terms. Check Google’s sign-up page for the current amount and window before you decide. The same caution applies to a reported Google Cloud Starter Tier that may let eligible developers deploy without entering billing information.
Credit eligibility is the sharper question. Our sources do not confirm whether every Google Cloud product, AI model, GPU or TPU resource, or managed service qualifies for the introductory credit. Google also added third-party models to its marketplace in October, including OpenAI and Anthropic options, and the published comparison says standard pricing applies with no Free Program inclusion confirmed. Assume model usage bills normally until Google’s page says otherwise.
Google’s recent announcements show where its attention is. On November 4, 2026, the company announced AlloyDB Express, which according to Google’s blog includes 50 free compute units a month. That allowance belongs to that product, not to Google Cloud as a whole. Google also reported general availability of spend caps in Cloud Budgets on October 30, 2026, which gives hobbyists a stronger brake against runaway usage.
For a sense of what a small always-on service costs once it leaves the free zone, Google gave an August 2026 example of $5.70 for one vCPU and 1 GiB of memory running continuously for 30 days on a dedicated Cloud Run instance. Treat that as a single-source figure from a product update. It shows the order of magnitude, not a quote for your workload.
AI experimenters should read the GPU pricing gap between the three clouds before assuming a starter credit stretches to model training. GPUs and TPUs are the resources most likely to fall outside, or drain, an introductory budget.
Google’s official newsroom is the best place to track changes to the program. Its latest news page carried the model, marketplace and cost-control announcements cited above, and it is the first place a change to the free program would surface.
Adoption Data From Three Sources: Where Your Free Skills Pay Off
A free tier is a training ground, so it helps to know which platform the market actually uses. Free-tier benchmarks in the speed-test sense do not exist, since the offers are quotas, not products. Adoption surveys and analyst placements are the closest honest yardstick. We pulled three independent sources: the Stack Overflow Developer Survey, the Flexera State of the Cloud report, and Gartner Magic Quadrant placements as reported by the vendors.
The Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey reports that “AWS was used by 43.3% of Stack Overflow survey respondents, compared with 26.3% for Microsoft Azure and 24.6% for Google Cloud,” according to the survey’s technology results. Among developers, AWS is the clear default.
Company size changes the picture. In Flexera’s 2025 State of the Cloud report, “Among SMBs, 53% reported using AWS, compared with 29% using Microsoft Azure.” The same report says “Among enterprises, 81% reported using Microsoft Azure and 79% reported using AWS for some or significant workloads.” Flexera also found that “Google Cloud was used by 46% of organizations for some or significant workloads.” All three Flexera statements come from its 2025 State of the Cloud report.
| Source | Metric | AWS | Azure | Google Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stack Overflow 2025 survey | Share of respondents using the platform | 43.3% | 26.3% | 24.6% |
| Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud | SMB usage | 53% | 29% | Not reported in the cited statement |
| Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud | Enterprise usage, some or significant workloads | 79% | 81% | Not reported in the cited statement |
| Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud | All organizations, some or significant workloads | Not reported in the cited statement | Not reported in the cited statement | 46% |
Analyst placements add a third angle. Microsoft says Gartner named it a Leader in the 2026 Magic Quadrants for Cloud-Native Application Platforms (reported August 17), Container Management (September 10) and Server Virtualization Platforms (October 14). AWS’s own pages say it was named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for strategic cloud platform services. These are vendor-reported placements, so read them as marketing with a real underlying report, not as neutral rankings.
What does this mean for a free-tier choice? If your goal is employability or startup work, AWS skills carry the widest reach among developers and small businesses. If you target large enterprises, Azure experience matters just as much, given Flexera’s enterprise numbers. Google Cloud skills help in data and AI roles, though the survey numbers put it third. For the market-level view of who is growing fastest, see our breakdown of cloud market share and growth.
Pricing After the Free Period: What the Bill Looks Like
The free period is the cheap part. The real cost question is what you pay in month seven on AWS, month two on Azure, or the day a Google workload exceeds its free limits. None of the three publishes one flat price, because all three bill by usage. The table collects the signals each provider’s own pages give us.
| Provider | Billing model after the free period | Official cost signal |
|---|---|---|
| AWS | Paid plan, pay-as-you-go, service-specific rates | No fixed subscription fee, optional monthly spend limit from $20 |
| AWS Lightsail | Fixed monthly bundles | WordPress instance $5 a month, CDN distribution $2.50, object storage bucket $1 |
| AWS Lightsail storage | Per GB | Block storage from 8 GB at $0.10 per allocated GB per month |
| AWS Lightsail data transfer | Quota plus overage | 500 GB a month per container service, overage from $0.09 per GB |
| Azure | Consumption-based, each service priced on its own model | Savings plan advertised at up to 65% off select compute services |
| Azure Functions | Hosting-plan dependent | Free grant of up to 1,000,000 executions a month |
| Google Cloud | Pay-as-you-go with automatic savings | Discounted rates for prepaid resources, no single fixed figure |
Read the Azure savings line carefully. Microsoft’s page says “Save up to 65% on select compute services with an easy and flexible savings plan.” The qualifiers do real work in that sentence, since the discount applies to select services and depends on commitment. It is a tool for steady workloads, not for a trial account.
Billing visibility matters as much as rates. Each platform gives you a console view of spend, and the three work differently enough to affect how early you catch a problem. Our side-by-side of AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management and Google Cloud Billing walks through how each one surfaces charges, which is worth reading before you add a card to any account.
A practical rule applies across all three. Convert your planned workload into a monthly estimate before you start the clock on the free period. If the estimate lands above the credit, the free offer buys you a shorter learning window than you think. If it lands far below, the always-free allowances may cover you for good.
Real-World Examples: Seven Cost and Usage Cases From Official Pages
Abstract quotas are hard to judge. The examples below come straight from the providers’ pages, and they show what ordinary workloads cost once you step past the free line. We kept every figure as published and did not extrapolate.
- A WordPress site on AWS Lightsail. AWS’s own pricing example adds a $5 a month WordPress instance, a $2.50 a month CDN distribution and a $1 a month object storage bucket. The total is $8.50 a month to get the site delivered around the world.
- Two instances with a transfer overage. AWS’s second example runs two $5 instances for $10 a month, then adds 100 GB of overage at $0.09 per GB, which is $9. The total is $19 a month. The lesson: data transfer can cost nearly as much as compute.
- A container service with a load balancer. AWS prices a container service at $7 a month and a load balancer at $18 a month, for a total of $40 a month in its example. The load balancer costs more than the app it fronts.
- A stopped instance that still bills. In AWS’s example, a Standard XL bundle running for 20 hours at $0.90 an hour costs $18. The same bundle stopped for 710 hours at $0.00685 an hour costs $4.86. Stopping an instance cuts the rate, not the bill to zero.
- A university modernization on Azure. Microsoft says Western Sydney University took control of its modernization with Azure, saving approximately 30% in costs. It is a vendor case study, but it shows the kind of savings Microsoft targets with paid plans.
- A healthcare companion on Azure. Microsoft’s page says August AI built a healthcare companion on Azure that supports 3.5 million customers. It shows the platform handling consumer-scale load, far beyond a free account’s limits.
- A dedicated Cloud Run instance. Google’s August 2026 example puts one vCPU and 1 GiB of memory running continuously for 30 days at $5.70, per Google’s own update.
Three of these examples teach the same lesson. Load balancers, data transfer and idle-but-allocated resources create bills that beginners rarely expect. The free credit hides them for a while, and the first invoice reveals them.
How to Avoid Surprise Charges on Each Platform
Most free-tier horror stories share one cause. Someone left a resource running, forgot a service existed, or assumed a stopped instance cost nothing. The three platforms give you different safety nets, so the right habits differ.
AWS: lean on the hard stop, then set a limit
The Free plan is the safest of the three because it stops usage instead of billing. Stay on it as long as you can. When you must move to the Paid plan, set the monthly spend limit that AWS now offers, starting at $20, before you launch anything. If your account predates the October launch, open the Credits page in the Billing and Cost Management console and confirm when your credits expire. Never assume the old 12-month rule still applies to you.
Azure: read the avoid-charges guide before you click
Microsoft publishes a Learn page titled “Avoid charges with your Azure free account,” and it deserves ten minutes of your time. The two risks are the 30-day clock on the $200 credit and the services outside the free allowances. Put a calendar reminder at day 25. Review which resources are running, delete what you do not need, and decide whether you are ready to move to pay-as-you-go. Remember that the $1 verification authorization is temporary and reverses on its own.
Google Cloud: use Budgets and caps
Google reported that spend caps in Cloud Budgets reached general availability on October 30, 2026. A budget alert tells you after the fact, while a cap is built to stop spending at a threshold. Set both on day one. Google also described real-time spending caps for its Gemini agent that can pause an agent when a project limit is reached, though our sources do not say whether that feature applies to every account.
Across all three, the same checklist works:
- Create one throwaway project or account per experiment so you can delete everything at once.
- Tag every resource with a name and a date.
- Turn off load balancers, NAT gateways and idle databases at the end of each session.
- Check the billing console every few days, not at the end of the month.
- Treat GPU and AI model usage as paid until the provider states in writing that credits cover it.
Use-Case Recommendations: Which Free Tier Fits Which Job
The best free tier depends on what you plan to build and how long you plan to keep it. The table below maps six common jobs to a pick, with the reasoning attached.
| Use case | Best fit | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Learning cloud basics from scratch | AWS Free plan | Usage stops instead of billing, and most new customers skip the credit card |
| One-month proof of concept for a Microsoft shop | Azure free account | $200 credit plus exact service quotas for web apps and databases |
| Small bot or hobby API that should stay free | Google Cloud always-free products | 20+ always-free products with no recurring charge inside the limits |
| Student with an academic email | Azure student offer | $100 credit and no credit card required |
| Machine learning experiments | AWS Free plan | Credits confirmed for SageMaker AI training, endpoints and notebooks |
| Serverless function prototype | Azure Functions or AWS Lambda | Azure lists a 1,000,000-execution monthly grant, Lambda is among AWS’s eligible services |
A few of these deserve extra context. The student route on Azure is the only offer in this article that removes both the card requirement and the 30-day pressure from the starter credit, though Microsoft’s page does not state how long the $100 lasts, so confirm that before you plan a semester project around it.
Teams exploring hybrid setups should look past the free tiers entirely. If your real goal is running cloud services on your own hardware, our comparison of AWS Outposts, Azure Local and Google Distributed Cloud covers the paid options, since none of the free offers extend to on-premises hardware.
For AI tinkerers, the picture is mixed. AWS says its credits cover SageMaker AI. Google’s sources leave model eligibility unconfirmed. Microsoft’s pages list a Microsoft Foundry platform with consumption-based pricing, where each service and feature carries its own price, so a free account does not guarantee free model calls. If AI is your main reason for signing up, ask the provider’s support or read the credit terms line by line.
Migration Guide: Moving Between Free Tiers Without Losing Work
People hop between free tiers on purpose. A project outgrows its quota, a credit expires, or a new offer looks better. Treat each hop as a small migration, and keep your work portable from the start. Azure limits each new customer to one account with free services and the $200 credit, and AWS reserves its introductory offer for new customers. The practical hop is to a different provider, not to a second account on the same one.
AWS in particular is courting switchers. On October 13, 2026, it announced expanded migration paths in its Startup Advisor tool, including support for moving apps built with Lovable, Bolt.new and Replit, plus Azure-to-AWS migration planning and visibility into costs and credits. If you plan a move in either direction, check what the destination offers before you tear anything down.
An eight-step portability routine
- Inventory everything. List every resource, its region and its monthly cost. Do this a month before the free period ends.
- Define infrastructure as code. Terraform or a similar tool lets you rebuild an environment on another cloud with edits, not a from-scratch effort.
- Containerize the app. A container image runs on all three platforms, which cuts the work of a move.
- Export your data. Dump databases and copy object storage to a neutral location. Remember AWS retains Free plan account data for 90 days after expiry, which is a safety net and not a plan.
- Keep secrets out of the code. Store keys in environment variables so you can rotate them on the new platform.
- Stand up the new environment first. Test it with real traffic before you shut down the old one.
- Switch DNS last. Lower the record’s time to live a day ahead, then cut over.
- Delete the old resources. Confirm in the billing console that nothing is still running.
Verify which account you are logged into before you delete anything. These three commands, one per provider, print the current identity:
aws sts get-caller-identity
az account show
gcloud config listBackups deserve their own thought. A free tier rarely includes the disaster recovery tooling a production system needs, and the options differ by provider. Our comparison of AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, Azure Site Recovery and Google Cloud options shows what to budget for once your project graduates from experiment to something you cannot afford to lose.
Pros and Cons of Each Free Offer
Every offer trades something for what it gives. Here is the honest ledger for each provider, based only on what the sources confirmed.
AWS Free Tier
- Pro: The Free plan stops usage instead of billing, so a beginner cannot rack up a surprise invoice by accident.
- Pro: Up to $200 in credits, with $100 arriving immediately and no credit card needed for most new customers.
- Pro: Credits reach SageMaker AI, and T8i micro and small instances qualify for Free Tier usage.
- Pro: The widest developer adoption in the Stack Overflow survey, at 43.3%.
- Con: Six months is the hard limit, and credits cannot be extended.
- Con: Access covers selected services, not the whole catalog, and AWS pages disagree on whether that means 90 or 100+.
- Con: Accounts opened before the October launch must check the Credits page, and the old 12-month rule no longer applies to new accounts.
Azure free account
- Pro: Exact, published service quotas, from databases to web apps to a MongoDB cluster.
- Pro: 12-month services extend your runway well past the 30-day credit.
- Pro: A student path with a $100 credit and no credit card.
- Pro: Leads Flexera’s enterprise usage figure at 81%, which helps if you target large employers.
- Con: The $200 credit lasts only up to 30 days.
- Con: One account per new customer, and sovereign regions are excluded.
- Con: A temporary $1 card authorization at sign-up, and the Linux Consumption Functions plan is scheduled to retire in September 2028.
Google Cloud free program
- Pro: 20+ always-free products, the best fit for workloads that should stay free.
- Pro: Pay-as-you-go pricing with automatic savings, which suits small projects.
- Pro: Google reportedly described real-time AI spending caps on October 8, 2026 that can pause an agent when a project limit is reached.
- Con: Credit amount, duration and eligibility are harder to confirm from official pages today.
- Con: AI model and accelerator usage may not be covered by credits.
- Con: Third place in the Stack Overflow survey at 24.6%, so fewer job-market ripples from the skills you build.
The ledger tilts toward AWS for newcomers and toward Google for long-lived hobby projects. Azure sits in the middle, with the best documentation of what you actually get.
The Verdict: Pick AWS to Learn, Azure to Prototype, Google to Park
Our recommendation depends on your goal, and the data supports a clear split. For someone opening a cloud account for the first time, the AWS Free plan is the best choice in November 2026. It offers up to $200 over six months, it needs no card for most people, and it stops instead of billing. No other offer here removes the risk of a surprise invoice so completely.
For a short, focused proof of concept, choose the Azure free account. The $200 credit expires in 30 days, but the selected services free for 12 months, including 750 hours of a Flexible Server database, give you more usable infrastructure than the credit alone. Azure experience also tends to carry over well into corporate roles.
For a project you want to leave running, look at Google Cloud’s 20+ always-free products. Confirm the introductory credit and its terms on Google’s own page before you count on it. That single open question is why Google ranks third for newcomers even though its always-free list is attractive.
| Goal | Winner | Deciding fact |
|---|---|---|
| First cloud account | AWS | Usage stops at six months or when credits run out, with no automatic billing |
| Short prototype | Azure | $200 credit plus 12-month service quotas |
| Permanent hobby workload | Google Cloud | 20+ always-free products |
| Job-market reach | AWS for developers, Azure for enterprises | 43.3% of Stack Overflow respondents, 81% of Flexera enterprises |
Two upcoming events could shift this picture. Microsoft Ignite runs November 17 to 20, 2026, and AWS re:Invent 2026 includes a CEO keynote from Matt Garman scheduled for December 1. Neither has announced a free-tier change, so treat any such change as unconfirmed until the providers publish it. Revisit this comparison after both events. For more guides in this area, browse our cloud computing coverage.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the AWS Free Tier still 12 months free?
Not for new accounts. AWS now offers a Free plan with up to $200 in credits over six months. Always Free offers continue alongside it. Accounts opened before the October 2026 launch should check the Credits page in the Billing and Cost Management console for their expiration dates.
What happens when the AWS Free plan ends?
Usage stops automatically after six months or when the credits run out, whichever comes first. You are not charged unless you upgrade to the Paid plan or activate paid-only services. AWS says it retains account data for 90 days after the Free plan expires.
How long does the Azure free account last?
The $200 credit runs for up to 30 days. Limited quantities of selected services stay free for 12 months, and some services are always free. Microsoft limits each new customer to one account with free services and the $200 credit.
Do I need a credit card for each free tier?
It depends on the path. AWS says most new customers do not need a credit card to start. Azure may place a temporary $1 authorization on your card during verification, and it reverses afterward. Azure’s student offer requires only an academic email address. Check Google’s sign-up flow for its current requirement.
Does Google Cloud have an always-free tier?
Yes. Google’s official material cites 20+ always-free products, each with usage limits. The pages we reviewed do not list every product and quota, so check Google’s free-program page for the current list before you build around one.
Do free credits cover AI and machine learning services?
AWS announced on October 19, 2026 that Free Tier credits work across SageMaker AI, including training and endpoints. Google’s sources do not confirm whether credits cover AI models or accelerators. Microsoft prices its Foundry services on a consumption basis, with each service billed on its own model. Read the credit terms before you start an AI project.
Can I use all three free tiers at the same time?
Yes, because each provider runs its own program. Many learners open one account per cloud to compare consoles and pricing. Keep each project small, label your resources, and check each billing console every few days so nothing runs unnoticed.
