Google Cloud Run
Hacker ApprovedThe most recommended of 7 container hostings
Recommended for scale-to-zero containers that bill only while active and avoid Kubernetes management. Main caveat: cold starts can be slow and costs can climb.
Recommended for scale-to-zero containers that bill only while active and avoid Kubernetes management. Main caveat: cold starts can be slow and costs can climb.
55 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 38
- criticize it
- 17
- approval share
- 69%
Recommended in 11 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 38 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 2.2 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 11 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Scales to zero when idle
“Cloud Run makes lots of sense when running lots of small apps, apps scale to zero automatically.”
Comment from 7 Mar 2026 in “Migrating from Heroku to Magic Containers” “Cloud Run doesn't bill when idle; it only bills when active.”
Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “AWS Lambda Web Functions” “Auto-scaling (0-5 instances, scales to zero when idle)”
Comment from 3 Nov 2025 in “Show HN: WordPress on GCP Cloud Run for $36/Month (Vs $59 on WP Engine)” - Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “AWS Lambda Web Functions”
Easier than Kubernetes or ECS
“Just ECS or Cloud Run have simple abstractions for horizontally scalable services and sidecars support.”
Comment from 31 May 2026 in “OpenRouter raises $113M Series B” “I find GCP Cloud Run soooo much more pleasant to work with than either AWS Lambda or ECS”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “AWS Lambda Web Functions” “it is cheap, it abstracts the nightmare of managing a Kubernetes cluster”
Comment from 27 Apr 2026 on Hacker News - Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in “I used AWS cognito for a startup. I wouldn't do it again”
- Comment from 29 Apr 2026 in “Alphabet Announces First Quarter 2026 Results”
Flexible: any container, long jobs
“Cloud Run is one service where GCP really shines. It is very flexible: handles services and long running background jobs”
Comment from 21 Feb 2026 in “Almost Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years” “serverless containers are almost always a better approach since it provides much more flexibility”
Comment from 13 Oct 2026 in “AWS Lambda Web Functions” “As long as you have a container that has an HTTP server on 0.0.0.0:8080 you're good.”
Comment from 16 Dec 2025 in “Umbrel – Personal Cloud” Cheap for small production apps
“Cloud Run has the best ergonomics/economics of all of the serverless container runtimes at the moment.”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “AWS Lambda Web Functions” “GCP Cloud Run + Neon for relatively cheap production hosting.”
Comment from 28 Aug 2026 in “Making My Terraform AI Friendly” “it's just enormous value for a small builder”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “We moved Railway's front end off Next.js. Builds went from 10 minutes to under 2”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Costs can add up quickly
“My fuckup was setting --cpu 4 --memory 16Gi during initial migration and only optimizing instance counts, not resource sizing.”
Comment from 27 Dec 2025 in “Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff” “If we spin up a new container every time (which we do when we were using Google Cloud Run), we had to pay API pricing.”
Comment from 22 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud” “Wait you’re still paying $5 per day on an idle service?”
Comment from 25 Dec 2025 in “Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff” Limits on routing and CPU options
“It does have real tradeoffs/flaws/limitations, chief among them, Run isn't allowed to "become" Kubernetes”
Comment from 26 Jan 2026 in “The future of software engineering is SRE” “GCR doesn't let you deploy to high-CPU/MEM instances, has lower performance due to multi-tenant hosts”
Comment from 19 Dec 2025 in “Systemd v259” “cloud run wouldn't fit our use case because of the routing and ephemeral nature”
Comment from 23 Jan 2026 in “Nobody Likes Lag: How to Make Low-Latency Dev Sandboxes” Cold starts can be slow
“Google has a similar, scale to zero container story but their cold startup time is in seconds. Too slow.”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “I Am Building a Cloud” “we find it has a much better cold start compared to Cloud Run”
Comment from 23 Apr 2026 in “Show HN: Broccoli, one shot coding agent on the cloud” Google terms and vendor trust concerns
“They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS”
Comment from 24 Dec 2025 in “Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff” “being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “We moved Railway's front end off Next.js. Builds went from 10 minutes to under 2”
Other container hostings people recommend
The four most recommended other container hostings, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud RunThis page | 38 | 17 | 69% | 11 | — | Approved |
| Amazon ECS | 34 | 9 | 79% | 9 | — | Approved |
| AWS Fargate | 10 | 13 | 43% | 7 | — | — |
| Cloudflare Containers | 9 | 5 | 64% | 7 | — | — |
| AWS ECS Fargate | 9 | 1 | 90% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
40 of the 72 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Unlikely we are staying after a day of no deployments and then this.”
“Those offer a more streamlined developer experience than traditional cloud VMs, but still require just as much compute resources”
“Cloud Run has the best ergonomics/economics of all of the serverless container runtimes at the moment.”
“I find GCP Cloud Run soooo much more pleasant to work with than either AWS Lambda or ECS”
“Cloud Run doesn't bill when idle; it only bills when active.”
“Cloud Run containers and an app runtime like .NET, Java, Go, Rust can inherently be multi-threaded, multi-connection.”
“serverless containers are almost always a better approach since it provides much more flexibility”
“Both scale to zero (really useful for hobby apps”
“even better for .NET and Java as Cloud Run supports startup CPU boost”
“I just can run it in Cloud Run and get all of the scale I'll ever need”
“Cheap and easy patterns, and you avoid no cpu throttling too.”
“I found Cloud Run to be super simple to use compared to ECS/Fargate.”
“GCP Cloud Run + Neon for relatively cheap production hosting.”
“But they aren't "without all that complexity" because it turns out all that complexity is required for even simple use-cases.”
“They've announced persistent "instances" recently which solves a big problem for us”
“Just ECS or Cloud Run have simple abstractions for horizontally scalable services and sidecars support.”
“If you’d been using Cloud Run, that would have reduced downtime by over 7 hours”
“AWS ECS, GCP Cloud Run, Kamal are all modern options here.”
“It's also very clean, scalable and very easy to set up.”
“it is cheap, it abstracts the nightmare of managing a Kubernetes cluster”
“Google has a similar, scale to zero container story but their cold startup time is in seconds. Too slow.”
“we find it has a much better cold start compared to Cloud Run”
“If we spin up a new container every time (which we do when we were using Google Cloud Run), we had to pay API pricing.”
“being tied to an evil corporation people are trying to move past”
“it's just enormous value for a small builder”
“Cloud Run makes lots of sense when running lots of small apps, apps scale to zero automatically.”
“always suggesting a workaound by hosting a Cloud Run function which would disable remove billing from a project via API”
“Cloud Run is one service where GCP really shines. It is very flexible: handles services and long running background jobs”
“you have much more knobs to control traffic, routing, roll out etc”
“Google cloud run and render.com are both pretty good alternatives”
“It does have real tradeoffs/flaws/limitations, chief among them, Run isn't allowed to "become" Kubernetes”
“cloud run wouldn't fit our use case because of the routing and ephemeral nature”
“My fuckup was setting --cpu 4 --memory 16Gi during initial migration and only optimizing instance counts, not resource sizing.”
“Wait you’re still paying $5 per day on an idle service?”
“It is fairly simple arithmetic in a spreadsheet to estimate the upper bound”
“They may change their service agreements or pricing structure in hard to decipher ToS”
“GCR doesn't let you deploy to high-CPU/MEM instances, has lower performance due to multi-tenant hosts”
“As long as you have a container that has an HTTP server on 0.0.0.0:8080 you're good.”
“I have a similar experience except I use Go+GitHub Actions+Google Cloud Run.”
“Auto-scaling (0-5 instances, scales to zero when idle)”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.