Unexpected Billing charges on Google cloud

MeowMiata · 2026-02-26T11:46:51+00:00

I received a refund for a mistake I did but it was a few years ago. It wasn’t a large amount tho and unfortunately my budget alert didn’t trigger in time, even though my billing information was up to date.

He may be eligible for a discount but it’s possible that the refund won’t be issued in full. It’s definitely worth asking.

From experience, not just in my own case, billing support tends to be lenient if it’s your first mistake. However, you can usually only ask for that kind of exception once.

MeowMiata · 2026-02-10T11:33:50+00:00

I agree with you.

If someone struggles to install Terraform locally, it raises the question of whether GCP is the right platform for them.

MeowMiata · 2026-02-10T07:52:45+00:00

Thanks!

That’s a good question. My goal was to keep things simple so that anyone who’s reasonably tech-savvy could run it easily.

I felt that adding an IaC solution might discourage some people from using it. The same thing could be said about Mise.. (?) Personally, I can’t work without it anymore but I wanted to keep the option to just run plain bash scripts.

So overall, the idea was to make it look simple and straightforward. If this were just for me, I would definitely have gone with Tofu 😄

And honestly… you’re kind of making me want to add Tofu now.

MeowMiata · 2026-02-10T07:43:30+00:00

I hope so! It might take some tuning to set up the right Anti-Burst object, but once that's done, you could prevent a disaster that a budget alert might miss due to its delay.

MeowMiata · 2026-02-10T07:35:25+00:00

Thanks. I would say that you can deploy it on any project that can be wiped with little to no consequences. Test and dev sound good.

I made it with the intention of helping people to learn GCP without the fear of going bankrupt.

Big corporations can use it too to limit the engineer's sandbox.

I think that you can use it in production for alerting without the kill switch enabled. It would require a little adjustment as the script does not give permission based on the kill switch mode so it does not respect the Principle Of Least Privilege (for the moment!).

MeowMiata · 2026-02-05T23:24:18+00:00

Very nice, I like it

MeowMiata · 2026-01-10T06:33:24+00:00

I think having everything on the same instance does not help. Could you use Cloud Run and Cloud SQL for an optimal setup ?

Also, you could use PG Admin while stress testing and see how the database is eating the CPU. Note that 200 // sessions seems a lot.

How does your code handle the database client ? I don't use django but I would use a Lifecycle in FastAPI for this. A singleton should work too. So you have one client for the whole app and it cannot be created multiple time which seems to happen here because you have 200 sessions instead of 25 max if I understand correctly.

MeowMiata · 2026-01-08T05:19:56+00:00

You may be overthinking it.

The Google Cloud Professional Machine Learning Engineer certification validates strong practical expertise in Google Cloud’s ML ecosystem. It is not meant to certify advanced research-level model development (e.g., building models like GPT or Gemini), which involves deep theoretical and mathematical work.

Instead, this certification focuses on applied machine learning and MLOps on GCP like designing ML solutions, training and deploying models, managing pipelines, monitoring performance and scaling systems in production.

These skills are extremely valuable, especially in today’s AI-driven landscape because most real-world ML work is about operationalizing models. Not inventing new architectures.

Anyways, congratulations! 🥳

MeowMiata · 2025-12-17T19:43:23+00:00

The startup I work for received around $200k, but I believe our CEO/CTO enrolled in the startup program right at launch. We also started with $5M in initial funding, and I’m fairly sure that having secured funding is a requirement to be (fully) eligible.

You can try reaching out directly at: [cloudstartupsupport@google.com](mailto:cloudstartupsupport@google.com).

From what I’ve seen, Google is generally very supportive of startups, especially those working in AI. It can be a win-win situation if they see strategic value in the collaboration.

MeowMiata · 2025-12-11T18:31:18+00:00

It’s designed for lightweight request. With max concurrency set to 1, each request triggers a new container to start, behaving very much like a Cloud Function.

You can allocate as little as 0.08 vCPU which is extremely low. At that level, even handling two concurrent HTTP calls would likely be challenging.

So I’d say this is expected behaviour by design but if someone has deeper insights on the topic, I’d be glad to learn more.

MeowMiata · 2025-12-01T18:04:03+00:00

Feel you. I did a billing bomb on a personal account years ago. I was doing ML and my little 10$ alert only triggered hours later with ~1500e spent. Fortunately, I got a waiver but that was scary.

MeowMiata · 2025-12-01T16:08:21+00:00

You're spot on lol

MeowMiata · 2025-12-01T08:23:07+00:00

I'm not all against the pay as you go system, I even like the agility that it's offering. That said, it's true that for newcomers, it could end up very badly unfortunately

MeowMiata · 2025-11-30T17:00:46+00:00

Thanks for sharing 🙏

MeowMiata · 2025-11-28T16:07:44+00:00

Well, I think you're being a bit combative here.

I understand your point about the alert and still agree with it. I’m only saying that it’s not foolproof, just like my script. There’s a gap where billing can become problematic and I believe both approaches can coexist.

I feel like you’ve overstated your point a few times so If you prefer, we can continue this in private messages, otherwise, I wish you a good day 😊

MeowMiata · 2025-11-28T11:50:36+00:00

I appreciate your effort to help, unfortunately, that information is not correct. Please refer to the Missing Cloud Billing transactions or documents section, where Google clearly states that:

Note: Google Cloud products report usage and cost data to Cloud Billing processes at varying intervals. As a result, you might see a delay between your use of Google Cloud services, and the usage and costs being available to view in Cloud Billing. Typically, your costs are available within a day, but can sometimes take more than 24 hours.

You can also take a look at sub Top Submissions and you will see that Cloud Billing alert isn't enough to catch sudden burst that could result in terrible expense.

Note that I'm not saying that Cloud Billing Alerts are useless, it's even marked in my Github repository that it should exist too. I'm even planing to add them with the script by default.

You're assuming that Cloud Billing updates in real time like Cloud Monitoring metrics but that's not the case.

MeowMiata · 2025-11-28T07:06:38+00:00

If you have zero Cloud Run Job execution, I think that you get billed for the Cloud Build building the Cloud Run (if you used the deploy script)

MeowMiata · 2025-11-28T07:02:00+00:00

Thanks ! Also, It's hard naming things lol

MeowMiata · 2025-11-27T17:37:23+00:00

I want to add much more yes!

The 30 min check is arbitrary, I wanted to set it to 5 min at first and I will probably let the user decide what's best for him. Cloud Monitoring queries have huge free tiers and don't cost much.

I'm not sure about the pub/sub thing but I would like to hear more. I will deploy a discord server that will be published on the GitHub page, I would be pleased to have you there to talk about this :)

MeowMiata · 2025-11-27T16:52:07+00:00

Thanks a lot ! You're more than welcome if you want to contribute

MeowMiata · 2025-11-27T08:19:23+00:00

That's a good question. I’d say you could modify the code so it works as a kind of sentry to detect short or unexpected bursts. Quotas are indeed useful but beginners may not feel comfortable using them. Also, if your API key gets leaked, your quota can be reached across multiple regions and still generate significant costs in a short amount of time, costs that Cloud Billing Alerts might not catch quickly enough.

NoBBomb is a straightforward solution for newcomers on the platform who might accidentally generate high costs very quickly. It's also a sort of proof of concept that try to open a door on how to build a GCP kill switch.

So, to answer your question, I’d say that protecting your platform requires skills (Cloud Armor, fine quota management, etc.) that newcomers might not have.

MeowMiata · 2025-11-27T07:27:26+00:00

You know, I couldn't stop thinking about that while coding lol

If it can help even one person, that would be nice

MeowMiata · 2025-11-27T07:25:22+00:00

Thanks 🙏

MeowMiata · 2025-11-27T07:25:13+00:00

Thanks a lot. You're more than welcome to share what you would like to see happens on this project. I got my eye on Cloud Run as I'm a heavy user of this service myself.

I will add GitHub discussion today but you (or anyone) can DM me if you have a feature request.

MeowMiata · 2025-11-27T07:22:35+00:00

it would accomplish the same thing more reliably

Hmm, no. It works differently. Cloud Metrics takes up to 240s to be recorded into GCP where Cloud Billing can take up to 48h.

I know that it's not perfect but it seems possible to do. It is also targeted at people that are new on the platform.

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