Free tiers compared: GCP vs AWS vs Azure

Everyone loves free stuff. There’s no denying the allure of obtaining something without forking out any money. That’s why Amazon, Microsoft and Google have come up with free tiers for their cloud products.

While these three cloud providers collectively dominate this sphere, their approach to cloud computing is strongly dictated by their background. Amazon has a wealth of experience in collecting and aggregating vast sums of data; Google’s strengths have come from an analytical methodology, while Microsoft’s heritage stems from computing.

Choosing between the three can be challenging but one of the best things about them is that they all offer a free tier for spinning up an instance and trying out the platform before you buy. That’s why free tiers are vital to organisations looking to test out capabilities before diving in. Whether through credits or by applying tight usage limits, all three offer various ways to consume their cloud services for free.

As you can see in the infographic above, all three offer varied usage for each of their cloud products. For example, Azure provides 30,000 transactions per month for its image recognition API but Amazon and Google offer 5,000 images and 1,000 units per month respectively. So, developers who are focusing on image recognition might get more out of Azure compared to the other two. However, Azure doesn’t include core services like compute and storage.

Therefore, it’s important to know what are your goals and objectives before choosing a cloud solution. Google certainly offers some of the more generous limits to allow developers to get some serious prototyping done, and it’s always free tier is by far the most full featured of the three.

While you may not easily come to a conclusion, at least you will hopefully have the knowledge to make a balanced decision. Luckily all you need to do to get started is create an account via PointStar and get $500 of free credit.