Google's free tier for AI Studio apps: no card, no expiry, and a hard ceiling
The Starter Tier hosts an AI Studio app free with no payment method and no time limit. The limits tell you exactly what it is for — and when you will have to move.
Deploy an app from Google AI Studio and Google now provisions a managed Cloud project for it at no cost: Cloud Run for compute, Firebase Authentication for login, Firestore, and Cloud SQL for Postgres. No payment method, no billing account, just a Google account.
The detail that makes it interesting is not the price, it is the absence of a clock. Google's standard free trial gives you $300 and ninety days. The Starter Tier has no expiration.
What you actually get
Two active web apps per Google account. One region, chosen when the first service is provisioned and not changeable afterwards. An ephemeral filesystem — anything written to disk is gone when the container scales to zero. Firestore is on a shared daily quota: 1 GiB stored, 40,000 writes and 50,000 reads per day, 10 GiB of egress per month. Cloud SQL is capped at two apps, after which new ones fall back to Firestore.
What it means for your bill
This is a prototype host, and the limits are drawn precisely where a prototype ends. A single region with no failover and a filesystem that forgets are not things you ship a paying customer onto. You will migrate, and the migration is easier to plan now than to discover.
The real saving is not the hosting, which would have cost you very little anyway. It is that the demo you keep running for investors, the internal tool, and the three abandoned prototypes no longer draw down anything with a deadline attached. Both the $300 trial and the Google for Startups allocation are clocks: the trial runs ninety days, and the program credits run up to two years. Spending either on a prototype that serves four people a week is the most common way founders reach the end of a credit window with most of the value unused.
So the sequencing is: prototypes and demos on the Starter Tier, the funded allocation reserved for the workload that has load. That is the same argument as why credits expire before you use them, applied to a free tier instead of a paid one.
One thing to check before you rely on it
The Starter Tier is Google infrastructure, and the model calls it hosts are billed under the usual Gemini terms. If you later join the Google for Startups Cloud Program, remember that its credits cover Google's own models only — a prototype pointed at a third-party model is not covered by either the free tier or the program allocation. If that is your architecture, price the inference separately from the hosting and check what the other programs cover.