Google Cloud Reviews

A solo developer whose Gemini spend cap did not stop a charge of about 5x the limit after a stolen key, then saw six support agents over five weeks and only a partial courtesy refund.

They had about 60000 euro of Gemini API calls exploited overnight against a 100 euro budget limit, and Google raised their tier automatically. Support only says to wait.

Their low-traffic e-learning site ran up about 3,000 rupees in one night against a 100 rupee budget, so they shut it down and moved to Vercel.

As a student founder with startup credits they were billed about 4000 GBP in 3 days for Claude models via Marketplace that credits did not cover, and support said it could not adjust the charge.

They had run one small VM on Google Cloud for years at about $10-11 a day, then a compromise ran up roughly $181,000 of Vertex AI charges. Support confirmed the compromise but refused any adjustment, citing a Startup classification, and costs kept accruing after billing was disabled.

They bought a translation app on a Google Cloud backend that cost about $1500 a month, then found a $450,000 charge in 1.5 months after a compromised API key. Google offered only $50k in credits, there was no easy hard spend cap, and they are migrating off.

As a student they used the $300 trial to host a Minecraft server on virtual machines and ended up with a $157 charge. Their billing account is closed and support redirects them to an automated assistant.

Their startup project on Google Cloud was hit by an exploited old service account that spammed Model Garden APIs for 20+ hours, producing a charge of about 600k they cannot pay.

An old public API key was abused for Gemini usage and ran up about $87K in 5 hours before the budget alert arrived. Google offered a $55K credit, leaving them about $32K to pay, and they plan to look for other providers.

A billing account and project they never created were generated in Google Cloud and they were charged $70. Support could only give a simple refund and could not fix the root cause.

A commitment applied on a FinOps recommendation led to a roughly $12,100 charge, and support first promised a full refund in writing then reversed to 50 percent after repeated agent handoffs.

A compromised service account was used to spin up VMs, producing an $8.8K bill; billing support denied the waiver and a debt recovery notice followed.

They got a 47k dollar bill over two days and three months later have no resolution, so they have moved off Google where they can.

They used startup program credits and then got a 200 dollar overage bill while Vertex AI drained the rest of the credits after a tool used their Cloud account.

They report owing Google Cloud about 36K dollars after hackers abused their Maps API access to run up Gemini usage, and are seeking a Google contact.

They ran a test data population for a local app and suddenly had a 400 dollar bill, having not realised how expensive the requests were.

A compromised Gemini API key ran up about $19,000 on their nearly idle account, charges kept growing after deleting everything, and billing support gave only generic replies.

They had a similar runaway bill over a year ago, negotiated it down to about 2k, and are still arguing with Google to reduce it.

Their Gemini API project had a $120 monthly spend cap but the system failed to throttle, producing over $1,800 in charges in one day.

Google support closed their case refusing any credit for charges from leaked API keys, saying the decision was final, and they consider legal action.

Their team faced $32,000 in charges within 24 hours, and their support case has been pending ten days with poor support.

They saw a huge Gemini API cost spike and charges continued after support said they would stop. Two weeks later their projects are still down and support was bounced around and useless.

They had a spend cap of 1500 INR but woke up to a 4000 INR bill and a suspended project, with no way to reach billing support.

They were charged about $5 a day for ten days, ignoring their $10 budget. Support eventually refunded around 90 percent.

They were charged about 500 pounds on a dead, unused project in a few minutes. Their account was restricted and the appeal has gone unanswered for four weeks.

They noticed a 160 euro Gemini API spike, and while talking to support 12k euro more accrued. Support has no authority and they have waited three weeks for a refund.

Their team received a $12,000 bill on a Gemini API key they doubt was leaked and they are trying to reach a real support agent.

Their monthly usage of about 200 USD jumped to 10000 USD in 2 hours; billing took 24 hours to reflect and Google only cut the invoice to 2800 USD as goodwill.

After enabling Gemini API in a test project, an old unrestricted Maps key was abused and the billing report showed about 36,824 euros in a week.

Their company was billed an extra 80k USD after Google forgot to cancel an old Gemini Enterprise auto-renewal. Months later there is still no refund, and they say they would not use GCP again.

Their Google Cloud bill suddenly jumped to about 500 USD from Vertex AI usage they never made. They disabled the project and were still waiting on a reply from Google support.

They were hit with an unexpected charge of almost $3,000 on Google Cloud for a tiny RAG app. They complain that the support site only offers an AI chatbot and no way to reach a human.

They learned the hard way that putting a CDN in front of Google Cloud hosting gets billed for peering network egress and bypasses the free tier.

On the $300 free credit they used Vertex AI Veo2 and were billed about $8,000 within 8 days with no warnings; Google gave only a 90 percent discount, leaving $800.

Their billing account was compromised for cryptomining and produced invoices over 300,000 euros; Google gave a 75% credit but still demands the rest. Support replies took months with no outcome.

They got an unexpected bill of around 300 dollars in under an hour when a Vertex AI tutorial silently launched ten nodes. Their follow-up with Google about the cost got a slow response.

They were billed $16 after disabling an API and billing support insisted they were liable without being able to stop the charges. They called the model predatory and are leaving the platform.

On a small project they ran up $300 in two weeks just by leaving a VM on. They wanted spending caps by default.

In a similar overspend situation years ago they only got a credit after threatening to sue, because the billing alerts were about 6 hours delayed.

They report a roughly 48 hour delay before usage appears in Google Cloud billing, and say they have seen tenants rack up thousands in BigQuery before an alert fired.

At their company, moving terabytes of Cloud Storage data from Standard to Archive tier triggered Class A operation charges of about $170k. They say Google would hold the customer responsible, so no refund was possible.

They saw billing jump from about 50 dollars monthly to almost 20K in a day after enabling Gemini on an old project, and the billing cap did not stop it.

They were charged 400 dollars in one hour from a Google Maps API on their website and say they have had no message from support.

They incurred the same kind of runaway charges in May and a Google support specialist declined their case without giving a reason.

They hit the same delayed-billing problem on GCP, where damage was done before charges showed up, and say their team is moving off GCP because of how Google handles it.

They woke up to about $4000 in charges from unauthorized Places API usage after a budget alert fired overnight.

They were hit with an unexpected $369 charge and Google offered to refund only $18.

They report the same runaway-charge incident hitting them on March 12, with about $200k USD per day, and are still struggling with a support case.

They were charged 100 dollars in one day from an unused random key and Google left the bill in place when they appealed.

They suffered 220k of spending in 3 days and are still waiting on a support case while pushing back with their reseller.

They received a huge bill while using only the free tier after an API leak, and after long back and forth Google still wanted them to pay.

They built a fintech on GCP spending about 30K a month and are struggling now that $100K in startup credits expired before break-even.

Their API key leaked and produced a $700 bill; they walked away after collection threats and say support was quite terrible.

They say it is easy to accidentally end up on the paid billing plan as a student, and that it happened to them in 2022.

They had the same runaway charges happen to them, with budget alerts blown past within hours and no hard quota to stop spending.

Gemini kept running up about $60 to $70 a day even after they disabled the API, revoked keys and removed it from their code, until they escalated. They say it is very hard to trust GCP.

They were hit with a roughly 98k DoS bill on Google Cloud in about a day, and say a spending limit would have turned it into a small lesson instead of a ruinous bill.

They had an AI agent loop and spend nearly 400 dollars overnight and find Google's monitoring and limit tools confusing.

They woke up to a bill of around 75 lakh INR from generative API calls on their project.

Their company was caught by about 4k of unauthorized charges, blaming laggy billing and key design where Gemini was enabled on an unrestricted Firebase key.

A hidden model endpoint cost their company tens of thousands, similar to the billing surprise in the thread.

They built a GPU video transcoding pipeline on Google Cloud that was cheap to run, but egress to download the results once cost over 100 dollars.