Deploy Gemma 4 on Cloud Run: Pay Only When You Actually Use It

Last year, Google flew me to Paris for the announcement of Gemma 3 . It was an exciting event. The demos were impressive. But what really mattered happened later, back at my desk, when I ran my own tests and found out the demos weren't lying. Gemma 3 was the first open model that closed the gap on the big commercial ones. It didn't beat Gemini. But it reached the level Gemini was at a year earlier. For an open model you could run on your own infrastructure, that was a meaningful leap. I started integrating it into my own pipelines. Specific tasks, small steps, places where the answer doesn't need a frontier model to get it right. Then I made a mistake. I deployed Gemma 3 on Vertex AI Model Garden over a weekend for testing. Left it running. Didn't turn it off. Came back to a bill that made me rethink my relationship with cloud infrastructure. I made a video about it on my YouTube channel so others wouldn't repeat the same mistake. This article is the redemption. Gemma 4 just launched.