Table of Contents
Two pricing models
Lightsail is Amazon's VPS-shaped product: you pick a bundle (memory, vCPUs, SSD, a transfer allowance, an IPv4 address) and pay its monthly price, with the AWS platform available behind a door if you later want it. Compute Engine is Google's general VM service: you pick a machine type and a region, attach a disk, decide on an external IP, and pay for each per unit of time and size, with automatic discounts for sustained use. The first model tells you the bill in advance; the second tells you the rate card. Everything else on this page follows from that difference.
Lightsail bundles, from the pricing page
Linux/Unix bundles in the US regions, September 2026. Every bundle includes a public IPv4 address; the footnote on the page says servers created on or before June 29, 2023 have 1 vCPU, so the 2 vCPUs apply to new servers.
| Bundle | Monthly | RAM | vCPUs | SSD | Transfer allowance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| $5 | $5 | 512 MB | 2 | 20 GB | 1 TB |
| $7 | $7 | 1 GB | 2 | 40 GB | 2 TB |
| $12 | $12 | 2 GB | 2 | 60 GB | 3 TB |
| $24 | $24 | 4 GB | 2 | 80 GB | 4 TB |
| $44 | $44 | 8 GB | 2 | 160 GB | 5 TB |
| $84 | $84 | 16 GB | 4 | 320 GB | 6 TB |
| $164 | $164 | 32 GB | 8 | 640 GB | 7 TB |
| $384 | $384 | 64 GB | 16 | 1,280 GB | 8 TB |
| $884 | $884 | 128 GB | 32 | 1,280 GB | 9 TB |
Windows bundles are priced separately on the same page. Plans in several Asia-Pacific regions and Sao Paulo include half the transfer allowance, per the page's footnote; the US regions get the full figures above. Snapshots, extra static IPs, managed databases, container services and load balancers are separate Lightsail products with their own prices.
Compute Engine, from the documentation
There is no bundle. A VM is a machine type (the e2 family at the small end, whose smallest types are shared-core) in one of nine US regions, billed by the second after a one-minute minimum ("After 1 minute, your instance is billed on a per-second basis", per Google's pricing page), with a persistent disk, an optional external IP and outbound transfer each billed on their own. Google applies sustained use discounts of "up to 30% on resources that are used for more than 25% of a month" automatically, and sells committed use discounts of up to 55% (70% for memory-optimized types) for one- or three-year commitments. The per-hour figures are rendered by script on the pricing page and are not quoted here; Google's pricing calculator gives a monthly total for a chosen configuration. The Google Cloud review goes through the bill line by line.
Free tiers
| Google Cloud | AWS Lightsail | |
|---|---|---|
| Permanent free server | Yes: one e2-micro instance-month in us-west1, us-central1 or us-east1, 30 GB standard disk, 1 GB North American egress a month (Always Free) | The pricing page says you can "get started with Amazon Lightsail for free" as part of the AWS Free Tier; the duration and bundles covered are on the Free Tier page and are not quoted here |
| Trial credit | $300, ending at $300 spent or 90 days | Not a credit model; Free Tier terms apply |
| Catch | Free tier limited to three regions and a time budget; GPUs never free | Read the Free Tier page for what happens when the free period ends |
Google's Always Free tier is the more useful of the two for a server that stays up: it does not expire. Oracle Cloud's free tier is larger than either; the Oracle review covers it.
US regions: three against nine
Lightsail's FAQ lists the regions it is available in; the US entries are US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon). AWS also operates US West (N. California), but it is not on Lightsail's list in September 2026. Compute Engine has nine US regions: Iowa (Council Bluffs), South Carolina (Moncks Corner), Virginia (Ashburn), Ohio (Columbus), Texas (Dallas), Oregon (The Dalles), Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. For a Northern Virginia, Ohio or Oregon server the two are equivalent on geography; for California, Texas or the Mountain states, only Google has a region. The US datacenter guide covers which region serves which audience.
Transfer and overage
Lightsail includes 1 to 9 TB a month depending on bundle, counts both inbound and outbound transfer toward the allowance (its footnote says so), and charges overage on outbound transfer at $0.09 per GB in the US regions per its FAQ; a worked example on the pricing page puts 100 GB of overage at $9. Compute Engine's Always Free tier includes 1 GB of outbound transfer from North America a month, with egress beyond that billed per GB at region-dependent rates on Google's network pricing page. For a small site the numbers are noise; for a file server or a media box, Lightsail's included terabytes make it the more predictable of the two, and a fixed-price host with unlimited or multi-terabyte transfer (OVHcloud, Contabo, InterServer) is more predictable than either.
Burstable CPU on both
Lightsail's FAQ describes its instances as "burstable performance instances that provide a baseline level of CPU performance with the additional ability to burst above the baseline", for workloads that "occasionally need a performance burst". The small e2 machine types on Google Cloud are shared-core types with the same character. Both are right for the web server that idles between requests and wrong for the encoder, the compiler or the game server that runs cores flat out; for those, Google's dedicated-core machine types, or a fixed-price host with dedicated vCPUs (Linode Dedicated from $36, Hetzner CCX from $50.99), are the tools. This page makes no claim about how either performs under load, because neither vendor publishes a number and we have not measured one.
Who should pick which
- Pick Lightsail if you want to be on AWS with a fixed monthly bill, you will later use AWS services, or you want included transfer in the terabytes for a simple site.
- Pick Compute Engine if you want a free server that does not expire, a VM next to Google services, a US region Lightsail does not offer, or dedicated cores priced by the second.
- Pick neither if the question is "cheapest small server in a US datacenter": InterServer ($3 for 2 GB), OVHcloud ($5.35 for 4 GB) and Vultr ($5 for 1 GB, hourly, nine regions) each undercut both on a flat price with none of the platform.