google micro (1 cpu, 0.6GB ram): $0.006/hr
    amazon nano  (1 cpu, 0.5GB ram): $0.0065/hour
    
    https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing
    https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/
    in both cases, +disk, +traffic

Not exactly a crippling difference.

Oh interesting...are nano instances new? Didn't see them last time I was looking for a "just throw up a demo" machine.

They've been around for a few months, but like all new AWS things, they're being slowly rolled out across regions, so may not be available everywhere. Flick through the 'region' dropdown in that pricing link to see if they're available where you want them.

The micro went from 0.6G to 1G ram in the 't2' generation, and the nano fills the need people have for the old micro size. I use them for bastion/nat boxes :)

Except google gives you a discount just for using the instance. Amazon requires prepayment

Swings and roundabouts. AWS gets flak for having expensive data transfer costs; Google's data transfer costs are even higher (both listed at same links above).

My point is that when you compare apples to apples, it's really not all that different.

Yup. AWS prices suck, in general. If it weren't for the large (multi-terabyte) dataset I need for my current project that they're hosting for free on aws-publicdatasets, I'd probably switch to Google Cloud. I may yet switch, which illustrates the danger of relying on proprietary APIs like Lambda.