Google has gone and cut its cloud prices again, reducing the cost of virtual machines (VMs) to as little as $0.01 an hour.

However, that price only applies to what Google calls “Preemptible VMs”, which are a special kind of VM that can only exist for 24 hours. And there’s a second caveat too, because Google reserves the right to shut them down at any time it so chooses, if it needs to utilize the resources elsewhere.

It’s a bit of a precarious arrangement, but for those who can tolerate it, savings are there to be had. Google is offering to rent an n1-standard-1 instance packed with a single vCPU and 3.75 GB of memory for the price mentioned above.

Google explains that preemptive VMs use excess capacity that its regular cloud customers aren’t using, which means it can be rented out to others on a short-term basis. Those resources can therefore be rented out very cheaply, but can be taken away in a heartbeat if a higher-paying customer chooses to do so.

The company said it’s able to reduce the price of its preemptible VMs after becoming more efficient at identifying which resources can be allocated into the preemptive pool. Google argues that the model allows the company to use its data center resources more fully while making cloud resources available to customers at very cost-effective rates.

According to product manager Michael Basilyan, the company tries its best to avoid preempting too many Virtual Machines from a single customer in order to minimize workload disruptions. The company says it does not charge customers for services that are preempted in the first 10 minutes.

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