Google Cloud hands a new account $300 in Welcome credit for 90 days, enough to run a small VM and a managed database for the whole trial with room left over. AWS, since its July 15, 2025 Free Tier update, gives $100 at sign-up and up to $100 more for completing five onboarding activities, on a Free plan that closes after 6 months. Google wins on the headline number. AWS wins on who can even start, because most new Free plan customers don’t need a payment method.
For a founder the bigger question is the startup program. The Google for Startups Cloud Program lists up to $200,000, or up to $350,000 for AI startups, spread over two years. AWS Activate tops out at $200,000 for provider-backed startups and starts at $1,000 for self-funded founders. Every figure here comes from the providers’ own pages, checked on November 2, 2026. We earn a commission if you sign up through our links. It does not change your price.
What each trial actually gives you
Google loads $300 of Welcome credit onto a new billing account and starts a 90-day clock. You add a credit card or another valid payment method, Google places a temporary authorization hold between $0 and $1, and that’s the last the card hears of it unless you activate. The trial ends when the credit or the 90 days run out, whichever comes first. Resources stop, you get 30 days of grace, and anything you haven’t upgraded is deleted. Sign up through an affiliate link and the trial is $350 instead, the standard $300 plus an extra $50.
AWS tore up its old 12-month model on July 15, 2025. New accounts get $100 on day one and can earn $20 each for five activities: launching an EC2 instance, configuring an RDS database, building a Lambda function with a function URL, submitting a Bedrock prompt, and setting an AWS Budget. Do all five in an afternoon and you’re at $200. On the Free plan the account closes after 6 months or when credits hit zero, whichever is first. Pick the Paid plan instead and unused credits stay valid for 12 months from sign-up.
What stays free after the credit is gone
Google’s always-free allowance, the Free Tier, has no end date, though Google can change the limits with 30 days notice. The list is specific: one non-preemptible e2-micro VM per month in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1, 30 GB-months of standard persistent disk, 5 GB-months of regional Cloud Storage, 1 TiB of BigQuery queries, 2 million Cloud Run requests, and Firestore with 50,000 document reads per day. Usage inside those limits doesn’t touch the $300, so a small always-on service can outlive the trial at zero cost.
AWS says more than 30 services are always free within monthly limits on both the Free and Paid plans, and anything over the limit comes out of your credits automatically. Lambda is the clearest example, with 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds per month at no charge. The catch is that AWS doesn’t collect the limits in one place, so you dig them out service by service. Legacy accounts opened before July 15, 2025 keep the older program with its 12-month trials.
Startup credits once you have raised money
Google’s funded tiers, Scale and Scale AI, range from $200K to $350K in credits over two years. Year one covers 100% of eligible usage up to $100,000, or up to $250,000 for AI-first startups, and year two covers 20% up to an additional $100,000. That second-year drop is the number to plan around. Eligibility is Pre-Seed to Series A funding raised within the last 3 to 5 years. The AI tier wants a Pre-Seed or Seed round within five years, or a Series A within the last 12 months. Third-party models are billed directly and aren’t covered.
AWS Activate publishes three tiers. Founders, for self-funded startups, begins at $1,000 and can reach $5,000. Portfolio, for startups backed by an Activate Provider such as an accelerator or VC, goes up to $200,000 and requires pre-Series B status and a founding date within the last 10 years. A separate AI tier above $200,000 is invite-only. You need a Paid plan account, since Free plan accounts aren’t eligible for promotional credits. Credits usually expire within one to two years, depending on the package.
What a small server costs after the trial
AWS publishes machine-readable on-demand rates, so the numbers are easy to pin down. In N. Virginia a Linux t3.micro with 2 vCPUs and 1 GiB is $0.0104 an hour, a t4g.micro on Graviton is $0.0084, and a t3.small is $0.0208. At 730 hours a t3.micro works out to about $7.59 a month before storage and data transfer. Google sells e2-micro, e2-small and e2-medium with 2 shared vCPUs and 1, 2 or 4 GB of memory, but Google only shows those prices inside its browser calculator, so we don’t quote a number here.
One cost detail matters on Google: E2 machine types aren’t eligible for sustained use discounts, so an e2 VM running all month costs its full list price. The free-tier e2-micro is covered by the Free Tier allowance instead. On AWS, burstable T instances accrue CPU credits, and Unlimited mode charges $0.05 per vCPU-hour for T2 and T3 if you exceed the baseline. That one catches people running sustained load on a micro and wondering why the bill doubled.
Where the surprise bill comes from
Google wants a payment method up front, and you must not have been a paying customer of Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform or Firebase before. Budgets don’t cap spend. An alerts-only budget just sends email, and Google’s own suggested fix is a Pub/Sub notification that programmatically disables billing on the project. Build that before you run anything with autoscaling. We mean it.
AWS goes the other direction. A payment method isn’t required for most new customers, and the Free plan can’t incur charges until you upgrade. The trade is that Free plan accounts lose access to a subset of services, including Savings Plans, Reserved Instances and some Marketplace offers, and the account is suspended when the plan ends. AWS keeps the data for 90 days, then erases the account. Joining AWS Organizations or Control Tower upgrades a Free plan to Paid automatically, which surprises people.
What you pay when you need a human
Google Cloud Customer Care starts at Basic, which is free, then Standard at the greater of $29 a month or 3% of monthly charges. Standard carries a 4-hour response target for P2 cases during local business hours, Monday through Friday, in English only. Enhanced is $100 minimum or 10% of the first $10K of spend, stepping down to 7%, 5% and 3% at higher tiers. Premium starts at $15,000 a month.
AWS lists Basic as free for everyone and Business Support+ at a $29 monthly minimum per account, or 9% of the first $10K in charges, then 7%, 5% and 3% above $250K. Business Support+ targets a response under one hour for a production system down and under 30 minutes for a business-critical outage. Enterprise Support has a $5K monthly minimum. On a $2,000 bill, Google Standard costs $60 and AWS Business Support+ costs $180, three times as much for a faster promise.
The winner: Google Cloud
Google Cloud wins on the numbers a developer sees first: $300 versus up to $200, a 90-day window with no account closure, a free tier that never expires, and a startup program that reaches $350,000 for AI companies. AWS keeps its lead on catalog depth and frictionless sign-up, and the Activate Portfolio route is easier to find through an investor than Google Scale is.
Choose Google Cloud if you want the biggest trial without earning tasks, plan to build on Gemini or Vertex AI, or have raised a Pre-Seed to Series A round.
Google Cloud offers (5)Choose AWS if you want to test without a card on file, your accelerator is an Activate Provider, or your stack already depends on services with no Google equivalent.
AWS offers (5)