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)