trying to understand gcp cloud costs and determine free or low cost relational database hosting

Question

I was originally planning to use Azure SQL for a client's database but Azure said that the estimated cost was going to be something around $250/month for the most basic configuration. I remember when using Azure for my own experimentation in the past, that Azure costs were higher than expected so I decided to look at GCP as an alternative.

GCP offered me a free trial credit of $300 so I accepted that by default. I created a new SQL Server instance via my GCP account, created the most basic database configuration, then connected via SSMS and created a single database table with a single Id column. That's it. Now, 2 days later with no additional usage of this database table, my GCP free trial credit has been burned down by $15. Based on this trend, a SS instance on GCP seems to cost about as much as an Azure SQL instance. Am I inferring this correctly?

Can you recommend a good quality option which provides free relational database hosting for low volume, low transaction databases? SQL Server would be great but MySQL should work too. I'm assuming that MySQL is fairly equivalent for simple databases?

Answer 1

GCP's pricing is really competitive on the market. With Cloud SQL you pay per instance/h and you pay more/less based on different factors. Use the Google Cloud Price Calculator to have a general idea of the costs and adjust cloud sql accordingly.  https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/

Additionally here you may find all the information regarding Pricing details on Cloud SQL.