A Google Cloud account that stays free

Time

About 15 minutes of clicking

Cost

$0 — a card on file, never charged

If you skip a step

Day 91: Google stops the server. Until then, the credit hides every mistake

Written against the real screens as they appeared in September 2026, signing up from India.

Step 1 — Sign up

Go to cloud.google.com/free and click Get started for free, signed in with the Google account that will own the server.

Why this account matters: whoever owns this account owns the server, the network and the bill. Use one you'll keep for years, and turn on 2-step verification (step 7 below).

"Step 1 of 2 — Account Information": choose your country and agree. Why: the country sets the currency, tax rules and which payment methods Google accepts. It can't be changed later. From India, the account bills in rupees.

Step 2 — The card, and the RBI e-mandate

"Step 2 of 2 — Payment Information Verification" asks for a card. Google won't charge it for the free tier, but it needs one to check you're a real person — and, after step 3, to keep the free server running.

Things worth knowing before you type anything:

• Check the name on the payments profile. Mine came up as "Test", left over from an old sign-up. Google prints that name on invoices and checks it against the card. Click Change and use your real name, as on the card.
• Credit cards are the easy path. Visa or Mastercard credit cards usually go straight through. Debit cards that demand an OTP for every payment are often refused. Google takes about ₹2 (a couple of cents) to test the card and refunds it.
• The yellow "Reserve Bank of India" box. Indian rules say a card used for recurring payments must support an e-mandate — a standing permission for automatic charges. If your card doesn't, try another credit card, or choose Google's manual payments (you top up in advance; with a ₹0 bill, the top-up just sits as credit).

Click Start free. You land in the console with the trial running: about ₹28,000 of credit (the $300), for 90 days.

"Automatic payment facility activated" — don't panic

A few minutes later my bank sent a message: an automatic payment facility was set up for "Google Cloud", with a limit of ₹75,000 (≈ $850), and ₹2 debited.

That's the e-mandate from the yellow box, and it's expected. What it means:

Don't cancel the mandate. If Google's payments start failing, it can suspend the billing account — and a suspended billing account stops the server. If ₹75,000 makes you nervous, lower the ceiling (to ₹2,000, say) in your bank's own app — never through a link in a message.

Step 3 — Upgrade on day one, not day 89 ⚠️

This is the most important click in the whole series.

On the console home page, the "You're in Free Trial" card → Upgrade → Upgrade to a full account → Upgrade. You should see "Your account has been successfully upgraded!". On the next offer ("Get production-ready in minutes"), click Not now — it's a setup wizard for companies, not needed, and not all free.

The card then reads "You've upgraded to a full account", with your trial credit untouched.

Why: here's the trap. If your billing account is still a Free Trial on day 91, Google stops every resource in it — including the free e2-micro — and deletes it 30 days later. The Always Free tier only continues on a paid account.

For most people, a stopped server is an annoyance. For an app whose whole job is "notice when something stops", it's the worst possible failure: a stopped server can't send the alarm that says it has stopped.

"Full account" sounds like you'll be charged. You won't: it only means the card stays on file. Inside the free limits, the bill stays at zero — and the budget alert in the next step tells you if that ever changes.

Step 4 — A budget alert that actually alerts ⚠️

Billing → Budgets & caps → Create new. This emails you when spending passes a number. It's your early warning that some setting has left the free tier.

There's a second trap hidden in this form, so here's every field:

The "Promotional credits" trap

A budget measures cost after the credits you tick. By default, your $300 trial credit is ticked.

So if you create a paid disk by mistake on day 3, the trial credit quietly pays for it — and your ₹100 alert sees ₹0 spent and says nothing. For 90 days. Then the credit runs out and the bill appears all at once.

Unticking Promotional credits makes the budget count real cost as if the credit weren't there. The first rupee a mistake costs shows up in the budget immediately.

But keep "Free tier credits" ticked. The free server does have a list price (about $6.11, roughly ₹550, a month), and Google cancels it with a matching "free tier" credit. Untick that, and the alert fires every month for a server that costs nothing.

Step 5 — A project of its own

A project is the folder that holds all your cloud things — network, server, firewall — billed to your account and kept apart from anything else you try later.

Top bar → the project picker (it says My First Project) → New project:

• Project name: lampsill. Look at the Project ID underneath: it appears in every address and command, and can't be changed later. If it's a random word-word-123456, click Edit and fix it.
• Billing account: the one you just upgraded.
• Organization: No organization.

That last one needs explaining. Google had silently created an organization for my account at sign-up, and the form preselected it. Organizations come with default security policies meant for companies — among other things, they stop you giving a collaborator's Gmail access to the project. The choice is permanent. For one person and one project, No organization is simpler.

Create → the bell icon → Select Project. The blue bar should say Now viewing project "lampsill" in organization "No organization".

Step 6 — 2-step verification

The yellow Enable MFA card on the home page, or your Google account's security settings.

Why: this account owns the server. If someone else gets into it, they can delete the server, read the database, or run up a bill. Google is making it compulsory for Cloud accounts anyway.

What went wrong (or nearly did)

• The payments profile was called "Test" — a leftover from an old attempt. Easy to miss; it goes on every invoice.
• The bank's ₹75,000 message looked alarming. It's a ceiling, not a charge — and cancelling it is what would actually cause harm.
• An organization was created for me without asking, and preselected on the project form. Worth reading every field on that screen.

What you should see

• The home page says "You've upgraded to a full account".
• Billing → Budgets & caps lists your budget, Alerts only, ₹100, with Promotional credits unticked.
• The top bar shows your new project, in No organization.