To be clear, Google Cloud always had a free $300 trial. The Spanner news is confusing at best, but most likely clickbait. If you really want Spanner in your default $300 free trial, you can just ask ops to enable / increase quota for it. The OP is a promotion advert disguised as a major service change and written as a PM. That goes to the core of the untrustworthy behavior that I've observed from GCloud reps over multiple contracts.