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.
63signal
262reviewsi
A score out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews, so a handful of glowing reviews can’t beat a product many people like.
21% Positive18% Mixed61% Negative
What customers love, and what they don’tWhat customers noticed
Customer reviews (262)
Add your reviewShowing 62 reviews mentioning poor support Show all
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.
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.
Their Google Cloud account was charged $3,067 after a Gemini API key was stolen. Support was slow to respond at first, then refunded 50% after 28 days and 90% after 35 days.
They prefer GCP after years on both clouds but note slow billing. Their one caveat is that Google support, from the cheapest tier to Premium, is worse than AWS.
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.
They have used Google for 8+ years but hit capacity problems, including an 8 hour period without one instance, and are now talking to AWS and OCI.
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.
They pay for the most expensive enterprise support and say it is still hit or miss, with calls declined or rerouted for months, worse than basic AWS support.
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 switched to Azure as their main cloud because they think GCP is not mature enough, and say Google support was helpless on a spend issue.
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 call GCP the most user hostile cloud and say its support experts do not know the product, so customers must re-educate them.
A Cloud Run app behind IAP and GCIP suddenly lost sign-in across 14 deployments, and despite paying thousands monthly for enhanced support it took days with no replication.
Their account was suspended for alleged abuse after a hackathon, locking them out of billing and projects while a charge still hit their card. Appeals went unanswered until a support ticket eventually fixed it.
They had a gcloud and Workspace issue open for over a month while support bounced them between teams without a fix.
They say GCP support is poor even at enterprise level, with cases taking months and half-baked features, but its ML services are second to none.
They ran VMs and a fastapi endpoint on GCP and had the project suspended without notice for vague TOS violations, losing access to billing and logs.
They find it hard to reach a human at Google Cloud support and only get an AI operator that hangs up on them.
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 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 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.
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.
They found the GCP UI horrendous, support absent and documentation poor, needing trial and error for basic operations, and were put off by deprecated features like the IoT suite.
Common questions about Google Cloud
Is Google Cloud worth it?
Of the 182 reviews with a clear verdict, 21% are positive, 18% mixed and 61% negative. The praise mentioned most is easy to use. The most common complaint is surprise bill.
What do people like about Google Cloud?
The praise reviewers mention most: easy to use (15 reviews), great value (5 reviews) and helpful support (5 reviews). For example: They find Google App Engine easier to set up and more secure than AWS offerings, and nearly free for small jobs.
What are the most common complaints about Google Cloud?
The complaints reviewers mention most: surprise bill (71 reviews), poor support (49 reviews) and outages (8 reviews). For example: On a small project they ran up $300 in two weeks just by leaving a VM on. They wanted spending caps by default.
What does the signal score of 63 mean?
It's how well reviewed Google Cloud is, out of 100. Negative and mixed reviews take points off, and so does having only a few reviews: a service needs plenty of them, compared with the most-reviewed services here, to reach the high 80s and 90s. It's worked out from reviews only, needs at least 5 of them, and updates as new ones come in.
What are the specs of Google Cloud?
Category: Cloud platform. Free plan: Yes.
Where do these Google Cloud reviews come from?
262 are quotes from Reddit, each linked to the original. Customer reviews are checked for spam before they appear. Every review, written here or quoted, is read as positive, mixed or negative.
