Wait you’re still paying $5 per day on an idle service? That’s absurd.
I came here to say this.
OP, what are you even doing that requires $150/month of spend, especially given things are mostly idle?
Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
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Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#32I am sorry for the OP but this is a perfect example of "You don't need cloud at your stage". Get a $10 VPS and call it a day. Unless you have 1000s of daily active users, a $10 VPS with a solid backup strategy will work. Heck, you can even do more than that with a decent VPS. You could setup a docker compose on 1 single decent server and call it a day when you have 0 users.
Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#33Wait you’re still paying $5 per day on an idle service? That’s absurd.
I came here to say this. OP, what are you even doing that requires $150/month of spend, especially given things are mostly idle?
Photo culling app. Photographers upload 1000+ images, ML clusters similar shots so clients can pick favorites faster. Needs serious parallel compute (but infrequently). Cloud SQL is the baseline (~$40-50/month, doesn't scale to zero).
My fuckup was setting --cpu 4 --memory 16Gi during initial migration and only optimizing instance counts, not resource sizing.
Didn't help that GCP has no hard spending cap. Budgets only send alerts (in my case 1 easy to miss alert saying you spent more than $50 this month), they don't stop charges... Looking at my credit card statement there are multiple $1-2k charges.
The incentives aren't exactly aligned toward helping you spend less.
Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#34Thanks to everyone with constructive feedback.
A few things that stood out to me:
One alert is never enough. Treating alerting as a system, not a single email.
GCP pricing calculator in the deployment checklist, not an afterthought. You almost have to be obsessive about checking.
Hard caps: GCP doesn't have them. Budgets only send alerts, they don't stop charges. You can wire automation to disable billing but that's a hack, not a feature.
Cloud providers benefit financially from complexity and opaque defaults. I own my config mistakes, but the suggestions around capacity planning and realistic cost modeling were genuinely helpful.
Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#35Thanks to everyone with constructive feedback. A few things that stood out to me: One alert is never enough. Treating alerting as a system, not a single email. GCP pricing calculator in the deployment checklist, not an afterthought. You almost have to be obsessive about checking. Hard caps: GCP doesn't have them. Budgets only send alerts, they don't stop charges. You can wire automation to disable billing but that's…
Sorry to hear this happened to you. Everyone's piling on, like they've never made mistakes. With no "hard" limits, it's almost like google wants this to happen. Have you tried contacting your credit card company? They may be able to chargeback google. Maybe you can make a case about idle capacity?
I have enabled some google services to play with (maps, calendars), that required me to put my credit card down. I'm thinking I should get a prepaid credit card so if things get out of hand, they'll shut me down rather than keep charging me until my max credit limit.
Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I came here to say this. OP, what are you even doing that requires $150/month of spend, especially given things are mostly idle?
Photo culling app. Photographers upload 1000+ images, ML clusters similar shots so clients can pick favorites faster. Needs serious parallel compute (but infrequently). Cloud SQL is the baseline (~$40-50/month, doesn't scale to zero). My fuckup was setting --cpu 4 --memory 16Gi during initial migration and only optimizing instance counts, not resource sizing. Didn't help that GCP has no hard spending cap. Budgets onl…
> Cloud SQL is the baseline
Does GCP not have something equivalent to Aurora Serverless? [0]
It's more expensive if you are constantly using the database over the course of a month, but much less expensive if you only have bursty traffic.
Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#37This is the modern-day equivalent of asking the genie from the magic lamp for something, and getting something else that meets the letter but not the spirit of the request.
The smart thing to do is realize you don't know what you're doing, and don't rely on the genie at all. Or hire someone who knows how to tame the genie. Or whatever; someone else put it better: you fucked around and you found out. lol
Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#38Some honest, maybe hard to hear feedback: as a solo developer with no customers and no traffic you probably shouldn’t be doing anything with cloud services. Cloud providers have many scalable services that mostly come down to them being paid by traffic costs or CPU/RAM costs and they don’t care what you’re doing, if you have 0 customers or 1000, if its “dev” or “production” - its all production to them. I’ve seen run…
Exactly right! Start with a $5/month VPS, then as needed upgrade to $10, $30, $60 a month. Then switch to scalable cloud.
Re: Google Cloud Run cost me $4,676 in 6 weeks with zero traff
#39> I’d appreciate hearing what others would do differently.
Don't use AI to build something you are on the hook for financially. AI knows no consequence.