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Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

tomshardware.com

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Re: Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

#61

Post by oliwarner »

rcbdev wrote: post #46
estimator7292 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same reason that you can't cancel a gym membership by walking up to a person and saying "cancel my membership". Predation, pure and simple. Google doesn't care, no one is holding them responsible for predatory behavior. It's profitable to steal from your customers and there's no downside to doing so.

Where do you live that consumer protection is this bad? Of course you can cancel any gym membership at their physical location, as long as you can also sign up at these physical locations. What idiot lawmaker would allow a system where you can sign up without a computer, phone or fax, but then need these media to cancel what you just signed up for?

Many memberships (like phone and internet service contracts) aren't rolling contracts, they're annual or biennial to lock you in. Of course you can cancel at the term of the contract, but many start strong, let it peter off, and by they time they realise they're paying for a service they're not using, they're well out of a cooling-off period.

Re: Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

#62

Post by Havoc »

robotswantdata wrote: post #29

Do yourself a favour and automate unlinking the billing account. Set it to fire when your budget is hit or whatever your risk tolerance is. Yes nuclear option, but I’ll take an hour down time over a $100k unexpected bill

Budget alerts can be up to 24 hrs delayed. It’s the pull out method of billing protection

Re: Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

#63

Post by senordevnyc »

untrue-lies wrote: post #55
rcbdev wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live that consumer protection is this bad? Of course you can cancel any gym membership at their physical location, as long as you can also sign up at these physical locations. What idiot lawmaker would allow a system where you can sign up without a computer, phone or fax, but then need these media to cancel what you just signed up for?

In the United States this is not true. Bally's gym memberships are examples of this. I had one once and there were only three ways to cancel it. 1. You die, 2. You become disabled in a permanent way that would prevent you from ever using it, or 3. You move far enough away that there is no physical location within 100 miles of you AND they won't be building one within the next year. This has changed since I had mine a…

Are you saying that those were the only ways to cancel in the middle of the contract term? Or that the contract term was infinite?

Re: Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

#64

Post by stevenicr »

dpoloncsak wrote: post #3
ReptileMan wrote: post #2

That is quite hostile to their consumers, no matter how they spin it. If you put a budget on something it should be capped.

I am the last person to defend Google Cloud and it's awful UX. With that said, when you go to set a budget it warns you "Setting a budget does not cap resource or API consumption. Learn more." with a hyperlink to https://docs.cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/budgets?_g...

Whoa! What?!

I recently turned a couple things on in google cloud and I was under the impression that the budget was a hard limit, not an email notify system.

If this is true I must seriously rethink my plan for marketing, and throttle on my own website somehow.

Re: Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

#65

Post by moring »

lazide wrote: post #58
moring wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems hard to believe that a one-hour delay on such a counter is impossible to achieve, and one hour would reduce the risk from "catastrophic" to "serious problem" in most cases. Also, if implementing a cap is a desired feature that justifies trade-offs to be made, then it is psosible to translate the budget cap (in terms of money) back into service-specific caps that are easier to keep consistent. Such as "autosc…

Eh, suddenly turning off all services in your account because you hit your cap is just as much a DoS type event - just of your services, not your wallet.

So? Many would prefer a DoS-type event over spending $WHATEVER_THEIR_HARD_CAP_IS. This is kinda the definition of a hard cap, so you would place it sufficiently high that DoSing your system is indeed preferable.

Also, doing this on a per-service basis doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, so you'd only kill that service and get at least some chance that the rest of your system remains usable.

Re: Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

#66

Post by lazide »

moring wrote: post #65
lazide wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, suddenly turning off all services in your account because you hit your cap is just as much a DoS type event - just of your services, not your wallet.

So? Many would prefer a DoS-type event over spending $WHATEVER_THEIR_HARD_CAP_IS. This is kinda the definition of a hard cap, so you would place it sufficiently high that DoSing your system is indeed preferable. Also, doing this on a per-service basis doesn't seem that far-fetched to me, so you'd only kill that service and get at least some chance that the rest of your system remains usable.

It’s the trade offs.

If you have an actual enforced cap, those services will be disabled until you resolve the cap - which depending on the latency for usage updates, may be hours after you pass the cap, and hours after you resolve the issue.

Or you have ‘warnings’, and your services keep working, but you spend more $$.

Previously, people seemed to be more worried about service outages than raw $$. Now it’s the other way around.

It’s a common issue with disk quotas in on-prem systems too, and they tend to cause a lot of similar types of problems in both directions.

Re: Google Cloud customer wakes up to $18,000 bill despite $7 budget

#68

Post by amaccuish »

ramon156 wrote: post #59
danny_codes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recommend switching to Hezner, they have hard billing limits. This current cloud paradigm of charging indefinitely is insane for normal consumers and many businesses.

Switching to hetzner for... Gemini? What do you mean

Gemini was the fraudulent usage, OP doesn't indicate they actually use it.
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