Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
Thanks LLM.
you're welcome.
€54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
201–210 of 325 posts
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd buy the technically impossible angle. Even if you manage to get your microservices to synch every penny spent to your payment account at realtime (impossible) you still have to waiver the excess, losing some money every time someone goes past their quota.
I'm with you. And what do you even do when the quota is breached, nuke the resources? People will complain about that just as much as overspends. I don't buy the 'evil corp screwing people' angle either. They are making farrr too much legit money to care about occasionally screwing people out of 20k and 50k.
Block network access ? It's not that hard
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#203Google responded to your post so that’s good news. We all know the nature of APIs, but a secure transaction system is non-negotiable from Google and its peers for LLM API use. Right now LLM APIs are like unencrypted credit card numbers floating around.
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#204Crude Oil Futures, Natural Gas Futures, Google Cloud API keys.
the widow-maker list increases.
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#205> We had a budget alert (€80) and a cost anomaly alert, both of which triggered with a delay of a few hours. By the time we reacted, costs were already around €28,000. I had a similar experience with GCP where I set a budget of $100 and was only emailed 5 hours after exceeding the budget by which time I was well over it. It's mind boggling that features like this aren't prioritized. Sure it would probably make Google…
I get furious every time this comes up and somehow there are bootlickers ready to defend big tech on it. My ~2 person small business was almost put out of business due to a runaway job. I had instrumented everything perfectly according to the GCP instructions - as soon as billing went over the cap the notification was hooked up to a kill switch, which it did instantly. GCP sent the notification they offered as best p…
Almost wish the people defending it were paid. Almost more intelligent to rush to the defense if there were a direct financial benefit.
Part of it is possibly the curse of knowledge. Someone in the 99th percentile of cloud configuration experts simply can't recall their junior dev days.
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#206Anthropic and Claude are running circles around Google / Gemini for me these days. Anthropic was quite helpful for a while but strange limit issues started popping up. The final thread was a bug that essentially broke my ability to develop. I moved over to Claude Code full time and haven't looked back. Opus 4.6 is awesome for accelerating probabilistic programming!
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I set a limit, and you cut off my service because I reached the limit, I would definitely not "complain just as much" as if I set a limit and you allowed me to spend past it. We're not talking about an EC2 or EBS volume here, this is access to an API.
Meh, you probably would complain. Maybe you forgot you set it. Now your project is taking off, making money, and it got nuked. Why aren't we talking about an EC2 - is that not a cloud compute service? People have been complaining about cloud billing since long before LLMs. Anything to say about the technical problem of constantly monitoring many services against a project or account-level limit?
You mean we can implement rate limiting on API for security purposes no problem but suddenly having it track costs as well is technically impossible?
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#208These are all poorly designed systems from a CX perspective (the billing systems). Billing is usually event driven. Each spending instance (e.g. API call) generates an event. Events go to queues/logs, aggregation is delayed. You get alerts when aggregation happens, which if the aggregation service has a hiccup, can be many hours later (the service SLA and the billing aggregator SLA are different). Even if you have ha…
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Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#209Can you pre-load money into your account and have that be used until it's zero, at which time you have to load more? Deepseek does it this way.
No. I believe all major cloud providers are Pay As You Go. I think only Azure has a tier where you can run on free credits for a while.
The only thing I've seen is in MECM (SCCM) the azure extension will hard shut down when you hit a limit. if you want.
Re: €54k spike in 13h from unrestricted Firebase browser key accessing Gemini APIs
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, that the main reason I never use services like Google Cloud if I don't have to, it's impossible to have a hard cap, and anyone pretending to be an expert, is just off. Google says that they can't provide a hard cap because that would mean shutting down all your services..bla bla, but at least give users the option.
We have spend caps at the billing account level and the project level (developer set) in the Gemini API now. There is up to a 10 minute delay in processing everything but this should significantly mitigate the risk here: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/billing#tier-spend-cap... By default, new Tier 1 paid accounts can only spend $250 in a given month.
I'm sure it's me being an idiot, but once again I spent 20m trying to figure how to do a specific thing in google-land and still haven't figured it out. Even if I did set it somewhere, I see things like "Setting a budget does not cap resource or API consumption" with a link to a bunch of documentation I have to analyze.