🔷 Creating a Google Cloud Account: Billing Accounts, Projects and the Free Trial

How Google Cloud splits identity, billing and projects, what the $300 trial and the always-free tier really are, the first hour (roles, a budget alert), and how to shut a project down and get its billing stopped

Three things that are not the same

On Google Cloud, three ideas are kept apart. This is different from AWS (where the account is both the container and the bill), and worth learning first:

1. A Google Account: your identity. A Gmail address, a Google Workspace account, or a Cloud Identity account. It is who signs in.
2. A billing account: the payment profile: the card or bank details and the invoices. A billing account can pay for many projects, and one project is paid for by one billing account.
3. A project: the container where your resources live. A project is the fundamental organizing entity: you need one to use any Google Cloud service, to turn services (APIs) on and off, and to enable billing for what you use.

So the chain is: you (Google Account) own or are given access to a project, and the project is linked to a billing account that pays. The nearest equivalents on the other clouds: a project is like an Azure resource group inside a subscription, and also like an AWS account, rolled into one.

Above projects there is an optional structure for companies: folders, and an organization at the top (it needs a Workspace or Cloud Identity domain). Google's rule: "all resources except for the highest resource in a hierarchy have exactly one parent." The services map shows it.

The free offers: trial and free tier

Google has two different things, and mixing them up is the usual confusion. From the documentation (read on 6 October 2026):

The Free Trial

• $300 in credit, valid for 90 days.
• New customers only: someone who has never paid for Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform or Firebase, and is signing up for the trial for the first time.
• A card or other payment method is required, for identity and payment verification. An authorization hold of $0 to $1 may appear. It is not a charge.
• It does not charge you when it ends. If you do not upgrade, then after 90 days or when the $300 is spent, the billing account closes and your resources stop, and a 30-day grace period begins. You can upgrade to a paid account within the 30 days to recover the stopped resources. If you do not, the data is permanently deleted.
• If you do upgrade, the remaining credit stays valid until the end of the original 90 days, and billing starts only for use above the credit and the free tier.
• Limits during the trial: you cannot add GPUs or TPUs, use Cloud Marketplace, request quota increases or run Windows Server VMs, and cryptocurrency mining is not allowed.

The Free Tier (Always Free)

• Ongoing monthly limits on selected products, with no end date, available to both trial and paid accounts.
• The best-known one: 1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM per month, in us-west1 (Oregon), us-central1 (Iowa) or us-east1 (South Carolina) (usage is added up across those three), with 30 GB-months of standard persistent disk and 1 GB of outbound data.
• The free GCP VM guide builds one. It says f1-micro as well as e2-micro: Google's current page names only the e2-micro, so choose that one, and check the eligibility label in the console.

Signing up (from the documentation)

1. Open cloud.google.com/free and choose Get started for free (the screens change).
2. Sign in with your Google Account. Choose a personal one for personal learning.
3. Choose your country, accept the terms, and add the payment method for verification.
4. The console opens with a first project, usually called My First Project. You can use it, or make a new one (a clearer name helps).

The first hour

Projects: name, ID and number

Every project has three identifiers, and the documentation is careful about it:

• Name: the label you see. 4 to 30 characters, can be changed at any time, and does not need to be unique.
• ID: the name you type in commands. 6 to 30 characters, lowercase letters, digits and hyphens, starting with a letter and not ending with a hyphen. It must be unique across all of Google Cloud, and it is permanent: you cannot change it, and you cannot reuse the ID of a deleted project, and it cannot contain a word like "google".
• Number: an automatic, permanent number.

Pick the ID with care: it ends up in every command and every resource name. Something like blog-lab-4821 works better than test.

Who may do what: IAM roles

Google Cloud's access system is IAM. You give a principal (a Google Account, a group, or a service account for programs) a role, on a resource. Roles come in three kinds, and the documentation is clear about which to avoid:

• Basic roles: Owner, Editor, Viewer. They are broad: Google says they contain thousands of permissions and that "in production environments, do not grant basic roles unless there is no alternative". The person who creates a project is its Owner, which is fine for a personal lab and not fine for a team.
• Predefined roles: fine-grained ones kept up to date by Google, such as a role that only lets someone view a storage bucket. Use these.
• Custom roles: your own list of permissions, when none of the predefined ones fit.

Policies are inherited downward: a role given on the organization or a folder applies to every project below. The smallest scope that works is the safe one.

For programs, use service accounts, and avoid downloading service account keys: Google's documentation says keys are "actively discouraged" and points to Workload Identity Federation, which gives short-lived tokens, and to attaching a service account to the VM itself.

Your own sign-in

Turn on 2-Step Verification for the Google Account. It is not a Google Cloud setting, it is an account setting, and it protects everything the account owns.

A budget alert

Cloud Billing budgets (console: Billing, then Budgets & alerts) warn you about spending. From the documentation:

• A budget does not cap anything. Google says an alerts-only budget does not automatically cap usage or spending.
• The default thresholds are 50%, 90% and 100% of the amount, and you can change them and choose actual or forecasted cost.
• Emails go to billing account administrators and users by default, to project owners for a one-project budget, and to others you add as notification channels.
• A budget can be limited to a project, to certain services or to labels. Setting one up is a five-step wizard: scope, amount, thresholds.
• There is a delay between usage and cost reporting.
• For automation, a budget can publish to Pub/Sub, to forward alerts (to Slack, for example) or to run a script of your own. Even so, it is a script you must write, and tested: a budget does not stop anything by itself.

The command line

Everything in the console is also available from gcloud, the Google Cloud CLI (and from Cloud Shell, a terminal inside the console with it installed). From the documentation, not run here:

gcloud init
gcloud auth login
gcloud auth list
gcloud config set project PROJECT_ID
gcloud config list
gcloud projects list

• gcloud init walks you through signing in and setting up a configuration: the stored account, project and default region.
• gcloud auth login signs in with a user account in the browser. Anyone who can read your files can use the stored credentials, so keep the machine yours.
• gcloud auth list shows which account is active (marked with an asterisk). gcloud config list shows the project and region. Run both before you create anything, so that a test does not land in the wrong project.
• gcloud auth application-default login is a separate sign-in for programs you write that use Google's client libraries.
• Add --project PROJECT_ID to any command to be explicit.

Closing it down

Two separate actions, and both matter:

1. Shut down (delete) the project. All its resources go with it. A deleted project is soft-deleted and can be restored for 30 days, and is fully deleted after 30 days. (While soft-deleted it still counts against your project quota.) From the CLI: gcloud projects delete PROJECT_ID.
2. Disable billing on a project (console: Billing, find the project, Actions, Disable billing). Google warns that all the services of the project are stopped, and resources may be deleted and become unrecoverable. A project needs an active billing account to use paid services.

For a trial account you simply do nothing: it stops by itself at the end, as described above, and the 30-day grace period decides whether you keep the data.

The most common mistakes

• Mixing up name, ID and number. Commands want the ID.
• Leaving the first project full of experiments, with no plan to delete it.
• Granting Owner or Editor to everyone.
• Downloading service account keys and leaving them in a folder or a repository.
• Believing the budget caps the bill.
• Not running gcloud config list first, and creating things in the wrong project.
• Forgetting that the trial ends, and the 30 days after it are all you get to recover the data.

The cheat sheet

• Google Account (identity) → project (container) → billing account (pays). Optional folders and organization above.
• Trial: $300, 90 days, new customers, card for verification, no automatic charge, resources stop at the end, 30 days to upgrade. Free tier: monthly limits with no end, one e2-micro in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1.
• Project: name (changeable), ID (permanent, unique, lowercase), number. Delete = shut down, 30-day restore.
• IAM: principal + role + resource. Avoid Owner and Editor in production, prefer predefined roles, no service account keys.
• Budget: Billing, Budgets & alerts. 50, 90, 100 percent by default. Alerts only, with a reporting delay.
• CLI: gcloud init, gcloud auth login, gcloud auth list, gcloud config set project ID, gcloud config list, gcloud projects list, gcloud projects delete ID.

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