I am able to connect to the app running in my pod in Kubernetes, but that was with a load balancer gateway, based on the documentation here:
https://cloud.google.com/container-engine/docs/tutorials/http-balancer
Is there any way to run a web server on Google Container Engine without having to pay $18/month for a separate load balancer?
Try using type: Nodeport for the service. This will open a port on all your nodes. You can use then direct traffic to that port. Refer: https://kubernetes.io/docs/concepts/services-networking/service/