Google Cloud Platform Always Free and the Standard Network Tier

A billing alarm triggered for the GCP project hosting this Blog. Google Cloud Platform provides a free tier which I had hoped this blog would operate within.

Looking at the billing details, there was a charge for “Network Egress via Carrier Peering Network - Americas”. Googling around led me to several opinions, open statements of confusion and ultimately no conclusive answer. The GCP free tier documentation states:

“1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month”.

Network Egress was bellow 1GB with no Chinese or Australian traffic, so why was I being charged ?

I contacted Google Cloud support and was sent several seemingly conflicting replies that did not appear to make much sense.

These replies included:

• Links to Carrier Peering configuration and pricing

• “is caused by VM-to-VM egress when both VMs are in the same Google Cloud region, regardless of zone, when using the external IP addresses (per GB)”

• “VPC Network is not included in the Free Tier program. You are running an external IP addresses that is causing the charges on your account. Regular network pricing still applies to all traffic.”

I did not see how statements from support reconciled with the GCP Free Tier documentation.

A Hacker News member suggested it may be due to the selection of Network Tier.

In the Free Tier documentation for Network Tiers it clearly states:

Always Free usage limits apply to Premium Tier.
Always Free usage limits do not apply to Standard Tier.

Was I using the Standard Network Tier ?

The project level configuration was set to Premium as expected.

However, I discovered the NIC for the VM running the blog was set to “Standard Tier”.

Mystery solved!

Woops.