Many players using GCP instances worry about unexpected charges! I do too!
I suddenly thought of an interesting trick (criticism from veterans welcome):
If you have an Oracle Cloud free VPS, you can combine it with GCP's free tier to create a monthly US exit path of about 200GiB for free.
Haha, free quotas can be stacked.
First, let's discuss why standard GCP free VPS is not very friendly for Chinese users.
GCP free tier traffic is not "global unrestricted."
Especially towards mainland China, the free outbound quota does not cover it.
If directly:
Chinese user → GCP US → Chinese user
Running large amounts of traffic easily triggers outbound billing.
So my idea isn't to force GCP to give free traffic to China, but to ensure GCP never has direct high-volume outbound traffic to mainland China.
The two machines I have:
Oracle Cloud: Singapore
Google Cloud: us-west1
Then chain them like this:
Chinese user
↓
Oracle Singapore
↓
GCP US
↓
US target website
Return path:
US target website
↓
GCP US
↓
Oracle Singapore
↓
Chinese user
It looks like a detour. But it's clear which server each segment of traffic exits from.
On the Oracle side: Oracle Singapore → GCP counts as Oracle outbound.
And Oracle Always Free has 10TB/month outbound.
So 200GiB is no pressure for it.
When returning: Oracle → Chinese user, also handled by Oracle's public network exit. Continuing to consume Oracle's free quota.
The real brilliance is with GCP.
GCP US node receives requests from Oracle: This is GCP inbound.
Then accessing US websites: GCP → US website.
This is outbound in the US direction.
Google Cloud Standard Tier currently provides: 200GiB free outbound quota per region per month. So this is exactly what we are utilizing.
The entire logic can be condensed into one sentence:
Oracle handles the China side, GCP handles the US side.
GCP doesn't do: GCP → Mainland China
Instead it becomes: GCP → US Website
This avoids the high outbound billing for China destinations.
While Oracle uses its own: 10TB free outbound to handle the China side.
What is the final effect?
You actually get:
A US GCP free node, plus about 200GiB of Standard Tier free outbound quota per month
The key point is that the website sees a GCP US IP, not your mainland public IP.
What makes this trick truly interesting is combining different directional free quotas from two cloud providers.
Oracle gives 10TB free outbound.
GCP gives free e2-micro + 200GiB Standard Tier outbound.
One handles the China side, one handles the US side.
Maybe what you really lack isn't a VPS, but understanding the rules.
