What are the eligibility requirements for the Google Cloud Platform credits program?
The Google Cloud Teaching & Learning credits program provides credits for faculty and students within regionally-accredited programs in the United States. Outside of the US, the program provides credits for faculty and students at higher learning institutions and universities that award degrees in eligible countries. The program does not support for-profit institutions.
As the program grows, we hope to expand to other countries.
When can Google Cloud teaching credits be used?
Google Cloud credits can be redeemed for 16 weeks and once redeemed can be used for 12 months after the course start date.
Is there a limitation on what these credits can be used for?
Yes. The credits can be used for most products in Google Cloud Platform. The credits can also be used for Maps Platform products. The credits must be used in your capacity as either faculty or student at your educational institution. The credits cannot be for commercial or personal use. It is the intent of the program that credits are used by students to learn about how to use the cloud. Students should be able to access Google Cloud resources themselves; credits are not available for course infrastructure.
There is also a limit to the number of projects and other resources (including CPUs and GPUs) a user can have. Please contact us at cloudedugrants@google.com if you need an increase in the number of projects. Most other quotas can be increased by following the instructions here. Project and CPU quota requests are subject to availability and may not be available for all projects.
GCP credits may not be used to engage in mining cryptocurrency. Please note that credits are awarded at Google's discretion. Google reserves the right to not grant credit awards, revoke credit awards, and to change the qualifying criteria at any time.
By default, GPUs are not enabled for projects, but you can request them following the instructions here. GPUs requests are subject to availability and may not be available for all projects.
What can I do with $50 in Google Cloud Platform?
As of 6 September 2022, $50 USD will give 2 months of an n1-standard-1 machine with a 20 GiB persistent disk running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But, typically, cloud resources only need to be active when they are in use — so for classwork, you can get more, such as:
- An e2-micro instance running 4 hours a day, 7 days a week costs approximately $6 USD a month (the first instance of an e2-micro is free as part of the Free Tier).
- 100 GB of persistent disk costs approximately $10 USD a month.
- Label detection of 1,000 images using the Vision API cost approximately $1.50 USD (with the first 1,000 free as part of the Free Tier).
- Standard speech to text transcription costs approximately $0.006 for 15 seconds (with the first 60 minutes each month free as part of the Free Tier).
- Translation of one million characters costs approximately $20 USD. This fee is prorated for the actual number of characters translated. The first 500,000 characters are included at no cost in the Free Tier.
- App Engine provides numerous resources in its Free Tier for no cost per month.
- 1 TB of queries in BigQuery costs $5 (the first 1Tb per month is free as part of the Free Tier).
For more details and current prices, see the Google Cloud Platform Pricing Calculator.
What are the tax and/or legal implications of these free credits?
We advise faculty members to consult a tax and/or legal professional on any implications of receiving these free credits from Google.