The Ultimate Guide to Building Agentic AI Apps on Google Cloud Platform for Free

Ready to dive into the world of intelligent, autonomous agents?

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides a powerful, free-to-start environment with state-of-the-art services to help you build and deploy agentic AI applications. This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to leverage GCP’s robust ecosystem without spending a dime.

From Vertex AI for training and managing your models to Agent Space for orchestrating complex agent behaviors, GCP offers a comprehensive suite of tools. You’ll also use Cloud Run to deploy your agents as serverless containers, allowing them to scale automatically. Plus, we’ll touch on native frameworks like ADK, MCP, and A2A, along with Agent Eval to ensure your agents are performing as expected.

This guide is designed to get you started quickly and efficiently, so you can build and deploy powerful agents at scale.

Why Google Cloud?

• • $300 free credits for 90 days, test-drive anything from proof-of-concept to production, risk-free.
  • Always Free products, so use select AI and cloud services each month at no charge.
  • Access enterprise-grade AI services powering Google’s own products.
  • No commitments required and pay only when you intentionally upgrade.

Step-by-Step: Setting Up Your GCP Free Tier

Step 1: Create Your Google Account

Sign up at accounts.google.com if you don’t have one already. This single account unlocks all Google Cloud services.

Step 2: Open Google Cloud Console

Go to cloud.google.com and click “Get started for free.” Sign in using your Google credentials.

Step 3: Activate the Free Trial

• • Accept the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.
  • Choose your country/region (affects billing and data residency).
  • Verify your identity:
    • SMS verification with a valid phone number
    • Credit card for identity check (no charges unless you upgrade)

Once verified, you’ll instantly see your $300 credits in your new account.

Important: The credit card is for verification only; you won’t be charged unless you manually upgrade.

Step 4: Create Your First GCP Project

• • In Cloud Console, click the project dropdown (top left).
  • Select “New Project.”
  • Add a descriptive project name (example: “my-ai-lab”).
  • Organization is optional for individuals.
  • Click “Create” and your project workspace is ready.

Step 5: Enable Billing (Free)

• • Find “Billing” in the left menu.
  • Link your trial credits to your project.
  • You should see “$300 credit remaining”, confirm it’s set up before launching resources.

Your Free AI Toolkit

• • Vertex AI, AutoML, and the Gemini family for data science and generative AI.
  • Free quotas on Translation, Speech-to-Text, Vision, BigQuery, and more.
  • Use Google AI Studio for fast prototyping and code experiments—no cost for early access users.

Steps to upgrade from a Free trial to Enterprise plan

Converting a free Google Cloud Platform (GCP) account to an enterprise plan is a multi-step process. Here’s a breakdown of the typical steps and key considerations:

1. Understand the Difference

Free Trial: This is for new customers and offers a $300 credit to use over 90 days. During this period, you have full access to most GCP services.

Free Tier: This provides a limited, but permanently free, usage of specific GCP products, such as a small Compute Engine instance or a certain amount of Cloud Storage, regardless of whether you are on a free or paid billing account.

To get to an “enterprise” plan, you must first move from a free trial to a standard paid account, and then from that paid account you can work with Google’s sales team to establish an enterprise-level agreement.

2. Upgrading from the Free Trial to a Paid Account

• • Go to the Google Cloud Console: Log in with the account you used to sign up for the free trial.
  • Navigate to Billing: In the console, go to the “Billing” section.
  • Enable Billing: You will see an option to “Upgrade” or “Activate” a full, paid account.
  • Provide a Payment Method: You’ll be prompted to enter a credit card or other payment details. Your card will not be charged unless you exceed your remaining free trial credits and subsequent usage.

Important Note: Upgrading to a paid account does not forfeit your remaining $300 free trial credits. You can continue to use them until they expire or are fully consumed.

3. Transitioning to an Enterprise Plan

• • Contact Google Cloud Sales: The best way to get an enterprise plan is to contact the Google Cloud sales team directly.
  • Define Your Needs: Be prepared to discuss your business requirements, including:
    • The specific GCP services you plan to use.
    • Your anticipated resource consumption.
    • Your desired level of technical support (e.g., Enhanced Support, Premium Support).
    • Any specific security or compliance requirements.
  • Negotiate the Agreement: The Google sales team will work with you to create a custom contract that may include committed spend discounts, tailored support, and specialized service-level agreements (SLAs).

Key Features of an Enterprise Plan

• • Custom Pricing: Tiered pricing or committed use discounts based on your organization’s scale.
  • Dedicated Support: Access to dedicated technical account managers and enhanced support services.
  • Advanced Governance and Security: Features designed for large organizations, which may include more granular control over resources, logging, and security policies.

In summary, the journey from a free GCP subscription to an enterprise plan involves two distinct steps: upgrading from the free trial to a paid account, and then engaging directly with Google Cloud’s sales team to negotiate a custom enterprise agreement.

How Fusefy Amplifies Google Cloud AI Adoption

Fusefy accelerates that leap turning your Google Cloud AI experiments into robust production deployments. With plug-and-play integration for GCP, lifecycle automation from ideation to governance and built-in monitoring for compliance, Fusefy ensures your AI projects scale securely and deliver measurable value while letting you bring your own cloud, tools and data.

• • Seamless Integration: Fusefy is cloud-agnostic and natively supports Google Cloud, letting teams build, deploy, and govern AI agents using their preferred cloud resources, tools, and models including Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, BigQuery and more.
  • From POC to Production: After using the Google Cloud free tier for prototyping, Fusefy helps transition those early projects into fully governed enterprise solutions. The platform handles everything from Jira story generation and model selection (including Google-native LLMs) to compliance reviews and continuous monitoring, ready for Google Cloud’s production workloads.
  • No Vendor Lock-in: Fusefy connects with existing Jira, GitHub, Bitbucket, and VS Code environments, enabling organizations to onboard AI rapidly on Google Cloud or any other major platform.
  • Governance and Compliance: Fusefy’s Audit Suite and governance tools add an extra layer of enterprise security, compliance and reporting on top of Google Cloud’s built-in controls, helping regulated businesses move faster while meeting internal and external standards.

Fusefy becomes the bridge from Google Cloud AI exploration to enterprise-grade adoption ensuring your team’s innovation doesn’t stop at experimentation but becomes a repeatable, compliant business advantage.

Learn more about How to Build AI Agents with Fusefy: A Step-by-Step Guide

Gowri Shanker, the CEO of the organization, is a visionary leader with over 20 years of expertise in AI, data engineering, and machine learning, driving global innovation and AI adoption through transformative solutions.