Can we update the title to say Free trial? The minimum tier is still $40/month (though that is a huge improvement and makes this a reasonable option for startups).<p>Was really hoping for something that could scale to zero. Better than no change!
This is the next iteration to make Cloud Spanner more accessible for developers to start using a scalable relational database that values consistency AND availability.<p>If anyone wants to try out Spanner without cost, this is a great option. There's also a pretty cool starting experience in terms of in-console tutorial to set up a sample app on Spanner.<p>I'd love to get feedback on getting started with Spanner.<p>Disclaimer: as my username suggest, I work at Google, quite closely with the Cloud Spanner team.
Technology behind spanner is incredible but unfortunately marketed horribly and positioned terribly. It was a solution built for large scale enterprise and no one else. It's not worth trying to sell this to developers. They're better off layering something else on top with a different brand and pricing model.
This sounds different from other GCP free tiers that don't have a time limit. The post says Spanner is free for 90 days only.<p>I wish Spanner had both a fully free tier and was fully managed like Firestore.
No software company goes from 0 to Cloud Spanner in 90 days...
Any new company will continue to use Postgres.<p>If GCP was smart they would make it free for life, then one in every 3000 customers would blow up and they could charge Oracle prices.
Seems silly to not make it free forever for say, 1gb storage and certain amounts of reads and writes a month.<p>If cost isn’t an issue my experience is that spanner is the best, problem is there’s no way to know this without paying a lot
I wish there was a true request per day free tier limit to play around with Spanner for small projects. Cloud Run and FiresStore are really awesome for hosting my hobby projects so far, at almost no cost.
So that hackers don't waste time looking at Spanner:
The price starts at north of 300$ per month (<a href="https://cloud.google.com/spanner/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/spanner/pricing</a>)<p>[edit]
I'm apparently wrong.<p>This is still a masterclass in how not to do a pricing page IMO.
As an aside to any Google people here, not having error handling in your JavaScript is a bad idea - that blank page does not shout “you should trust your most sensitive data to us” even if I know those are separate teams.<p>Echoing other people, limiting it to 90 days / 10GB is an odd choice – if you need Spanner, you’re likely to bump into both of those limitations, especially if you’re not already a GCP user. Databases are a critical service and it takes time to evaluate one.
Do they mean free like legacy workspace accounts were free until all of the sudden they weren’t?<p>We won’t ever use a google product at my work because they burned me personally on that. Hope they like stepping over those dollars to pick up those pennies.