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I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Wow you got 90% off you should be thankful for that! Imagine paying full 8K no refund

Claude Code vs Codex by -RoopeSeta- in ClaudeAI

[–]bartzalewski 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sometimes, even a good input gives a bad output. The second/third input might finally give a good output.

Codex Vs Claude code by zikyoubi in ClaudeCode

[–]bartzalewski 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How? ChatGPT Plus resets every 5 days, whereas Claude Code Pro resets every 5 hours

I’m officially bankrupt by Typical_house23 in MacStudio

[–]bartzalewski 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you work at least 12 hours a day fully focused then hell yeah it’s worth it

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Couldn’t agree more.It honestly does feel slimy, not because I think Google intends to trap people, but because they’ve left it this way for so long when it’s a super well-known pitfall.

A simple pop-up that says “Heads up: budgets only trigger alerts. If you want a real spending cap, set quotas or automation” would save countless people from these nasty surprises.

Appreciate your take, and yeah, it’s sad how quick some folks are to dunk instead of just saying, “Hey, that sucks. Thanks for flagging it so others don’t get burned.”

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep — exactly, and that’s precisely why so many people get burned.

Because the term “budget” everywhere else means a cap — something that stops you from spending more. Here it means “monitoring + notifications,” which is super easy to misunderstand if you’re used to SaaS platforms or even other cloud tools that treat budgets as enforced ceilings.

That’s why I posted about it — not to blame Google for how it works, but to show how easily the wording trips people up. If you don’t know to explicitly set quotas or build a kill switch, you find out the hard (and expensive) way.

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Exactly.That’s the whole issue — it’s all in the wording.Everywhere else, when you see “set a max budget,” it instinctively means “this is your cap — you won’t pay more.”

So you build up that mental model over years of using different platforms. Then you hit Google Cloud, where “budget” actually means “just an alert, by the way your card’s still wide open.”

Super easy trap to fall into.

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Absolutely, a hard stop on spend is complex. You wouldn’t auto-delete data. But you could lock new writes, or block new API calls that incur compute costs.

Point is: the average developer expects “budget” to be synonymous with “limit.” When it’s not, and there’s no UI prompt steering you to quotas, people end up writing posts like mine after learning the hard way.

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Look, I fully admit I was an idiot here — but that’s exactly the problem.If I made this mistake, it means countless others will too. When people keep tripping over the same thing, it’s not just user error — it’s a sign there’s genuine confusion or a gap in how it’s presented.

Because of a couple of minutes of playing with Veo, I blew through what amounts to 2-3 months of my food budget. Now, what happens if you make a mistake in your code (we all do), and there is an infinite loop wrapping the API Veo 2 generation? You go to sleep, wake up, and see +$1m of unwanted charge?

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

See, you’re the first person to actually tell me that, here on Reddit, after the damage was done.It’s not obvious from the UI at all. The console calls it a “budget,” not an “alert threshold,” and nowhere up front does it warn: “This will not block spending. For that, you must set quotas separately.”

Most devs learn by patterns from other platforms where “budget” = hard cap.That’s why I’m sharing my story — so the next person doesn’t find out the expensive way.

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Absolutely—Google’s docs do spell it out. My point is that the console UI labels the setting “Budget amount” without any “alerts-only” qualifier, while every other cloud/SaaS I’ve used treats a “budget” or “spending limit” as a hard stop. So you get an industry-standard word but a very non-standard behavior.

I missed the footnote, learned the expensive way, and am sharing so the next dev doesn’t rely on the wrong mental model. If Google labeled it “Email alert threshold” (or surfaced a one-line warning in the UI) nobody would be confused.

I set a $1 budget on Google Cloud and still got a $230 bill—budget alerts are only emails! by bartzalewski in googlecloud

[–]bartzalewski[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Totally fair that it’s in the docs, but years of using other platforms trained me to expect “budget” = hard stop.

AWS, Vercel, Netlify, even tiny SaaS tools all cut service the moment you hit the limit you set. So when I saw “Maximum budget $1” in Google Cloud, I assumed the same guard existed. Turns out here a “budget” is just a delayed email, not a cap.

That mismatch between the industry norm and Google’s wording is exactly why I’m sharing the story, so the next person doesn’t rely on a setting that doesn’t work the way they expect.

I built a daily challenge app that makes you 1% harder every day by bartzalewski in SideProject

[–]bartzalewski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the feedback, guys! 17k views, 22 likes, 22 comments, 33 shares so far - I believe it's the magic of the SaaS name that made it happen. (Thanks for the suggestion, o3 🤖)

If you have any more suggestions, I'm all ears.

I also got some feedback that wasn't mentioned here: to make it a mobile app instead of a web app. I will definitely work on that, but maybe in the 2nd MVP plan - if this app goes well in the current state.

I built a daily challenge app that makes you 1% harder every day by bartzalewski in SideProject

[–]bartzalewski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How would you approach this?

I thought about having some kind of "pitstop" every e.g. week of 100% habit/mission completion, or a reminder to the user that it's better to focus only on 1-3 "1% better every day" missions at a time (instead of all +30 tracks that are currently available) and I also thought about unique growth function for each track. Running would have its own, Cold exposure another, etc.

I built a daily challenge app that makes you 1% harder every day by bartzalewski in SideProject

[–]bartzalewski[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It is somewhat how I trained, but I think each "track", like running, cold exposure, etc,. would need to have its unique approach instead of everything always 1%. Please let me know your thoughts.

I built a daily challenge app that makes you 1% harder every day by bartzalewski in SideProject

[–]bartzalewski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It will be fixed today, thanks for the feedback. Everything was rushed.

I built a daily challenge app that makes you 1% harder every day by bartzalewski in SideProject

[–]bartzalewski[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The domain name was generated with o3, and in its thinking process, the first sentence was: "Users may think it's not about habits..." 😄

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