Web Service Free Tier Smackdown

The 3 main web services today offer an array of free stuff to entice you into using them, hoping that once you’re with them you won’t leave. This is split into 2 tiers, the free forever tier and the free for 12 months tier. Below is a table comparing what each offers on each tier. (Note Google does not offer any specific products for free over a 12 month period, but will instead give you $300 towards whatever product you fancy for that 12 months.)

In the tables below I have grouped similar offerings into categories that make sense to me. Similar products are on the same row, as close as I can get to comparing apples to apples.

Always Free
Storage
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Object Archive	Glacier	10GB
Cloud Storage	Storage Gateway	100GB
Warehouse					BigQuery	1TB Queries per Month, 10GB Storage
Database
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Migration	AWS Database Migration Service	750 Hours (limited by instance size)
NoSQL Database					Cloud Datastore	1GB
Object	DynamoDB	25GB
SQL					Cloud Storage	5gb-months per month
Compute and Containers
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Funtions	Lambda	1 Million requests per month	Functions	1 Million	Cloud functions	2 Million
PaaS			App Service	10 apps	App Engine	28 Instance hours per day & 5GB cloud storage
VMs					Compute Engine	micro instance & 30GB-months
Container Orchestration			Container Service	Free	Container Engine	5 nodes or fewer
Container Builder					Container Builder	120 build minutes per day
Security and Identity
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Mobile User Identity	Cognito	50000 MAU’s per month
Data Protection	Macie	1GB	Security Center	Free
Encyption	KMS	20,000 requests per month
Identity			Active Directory	500,000 Objects
B2c Identity			Active Directory B2c	50,000
Dev Tools
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Communications	Chime (Basic)	unlimited
Code builder	CodeBuild	100 Build Minutes
Source Control	CodeCommit	5 active users per month	Visual Studio Team Services	5 Users	Source Repositories	1GB private hosting
Continuous delivery	CodePipeline	1 pipeline per month
Testing	Device Farm (Mobile devices)	250 device minutes	DevTest Labs	Free
Debug	X-Ray	100,000 traces per month
Quick Start					Cloud Launcher	1 micro instance, 30GB-months HDD
in browser CLI					Cloud Shell	5GB persistent disk
Virtual Networks			Virtual Network	50 virtual networks Inbound data transfer only
Monitoring, Management and Analytics
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Monitoring	CloudWatch	10 custom metrics, 10 alarms	Application Insights	Unlimited nodes	StackDriver (also works for AWS)	50GB 7 day retention
Environment Monitoring			Log Analytics	500MB per day
Usage Analytics	Mobile Analytics	100 Million events per month
ETL	Glue	1 Million objects stored in catalog	Data Factory	5 activities at low frequency
Application Services
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Email	SES	62000 per month
push notification	SNS (Mobile)	1 Million	Notification Hubs	1 Million
Queue Store	SQS	1 Million
Workflow	SWS	10,000 tasks	Batch	Free
Service Workflow	Step Functions	4000 state transitions	Service Fabric	Free
Automation			Automation	500 minutes of job time run
Meta Data			Data Catalog	unlimited
Image analysis			Face API	30,000 Transactions per month	Vision API	1000 units per month
Speech to Text			Bing Speech API	5000 transactions per month	Speech API	60 Minutes per month
Text Analysis			Translator Text API	2 Million characters	Natural Language API	5000 Units per month
Pub Sub					Cloud Pub/Sub	10GB messages per month
Machine Learning			Machine Learning Studio	100 modules per experiment
Load Balancer			Load Balancer	Free
Search			Search	10,000 Documents
IoT			Microsoft IoT hub	8000 messages per day

Free for 12 Months
Storage
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
File Storage	EFS	5GB of storage	File Storage	5GB
Storage	Elastic block Storage	30GB	Disk Storage	2x 64GB
Cache	Elasticache	750 hours
Object Store	S3	5GB	Blob Storage	5GB
Database
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
SQL	RDS	750 hours per month	SQL Database	250GB
Object			CosmoDB
Compute and Containers
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
VMs	EC2	750 Hours per month	Windows VM and Linux VM	750 Hours
Container Engine
Container Orchestration	EC2 Container Registry	500MB storage per month
Games	GameLift	125 hours per month & 50GB storage
Security and Identity
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Dev Tools
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
IoT	Greengrass	3 devices
Workflow Automation	OpsWorks	10 nodes per month
Advise	Trusted Advisor	4 checks
Monitoring, Management and Analytics
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
Data manipulation	Data Pipeline	3 low frequency preconditions
Application Services
	AWS	Limit	Azure	Limit	GCP	Limit
API	API Gateway	1 Million calls per month
Directory	Cloud Directory	1GB storage per month
Content Delivery	Cloud Front	50GB of storage
Customer Services	Connect	90 minutes per month
Transcoder	Elastic Transcoder	20 minutes of audio transcoding
AI Chat	Lex	10,000 text requests per month
Push notifications	Pinpoint (mobile)	5,000 targetted users per month
Text to Speech	Polly	5 Milion characters per month
AI Image	Rekognition	5000 images per month
Load Balancer	Elastic Load Balancing	750 Hours per month
IoT	AWS IoT	250,000 MSg per month

Which provider you go for really depends on what you want to use. Without a doubt, AWS  and Azure offer the widest variety having over 100 products each to meet any requirement you could possibly think of. But how many of those products would you actually use? And will use of vendor-specific products come back to bite you after you graduate from the free tier?

Over the first year, for any provider, you will be able to host a small website with a small database of some kind and manage the traffic. You can even use some of the really cool tools and features, but I’d be careful considering the cost of these may not be worth it once the free 12 months runs out.

Whereas Google offers the most in terms of compute, alongside some nice AI products, they lack in terms of tools. AWS and Azure offer a lot of services and dev tools, which do make life easier, being able to easily set up deployment, monitoring and analysis within their environments are great, but their compute is only free for the 12 month period.

Moving from one provider to another gets harder and harder the more entangled in their ecosystem you become. The payoff you get for this is being the productivity boost and cross-compatibility of the services, so you have to calculate if it is worth it for your own particular case. The competition between the 3 providers should prevent any monopoly taking advantage of users, but it is worth considering how flexible you want to be. You may want to set yourself up on GCP as they have free forever compute, but move over to AWS to scale up as you want to make use of the free 62,000 emails or over to Azure to use the free load balancer.

Going into this, I anticipated AWS and Azure to be a close competition, with AWS just winning out. I expected GCP coming in a distant last, as their platform offers less than the others. However, all the main services you could want from a web service provider are there, and it is a fair closer competitor than I gave it credit for.

In terms of my own needs for my personal projects, I think Google will serve me perfectly on the free forever tier, as they are the only provider to offer a free compute tier forever. Their approach to the “free for 12 months” is also something I can really get onboard with. The $300 provides a lot of flexibility being used to bolster your compute and scale up, or on any of their other products. That being said, a move over to AWS or Azure isn’t completely out of the question if I need to scale up and make use of other products. (Also another 12 months free)