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. I