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

4/23/2026 at 3:00:39 AM

Looks like another instance, I am dealing with a very similar issue. I didn't even notice any sort of tiers, as I had 17 grand in costs accumulate at a similar pace.

I (a hobbyist running a small side project for a dollar or two a month in normal usage, so my account is marked as "individual") got hit with a ~$17,000 bill from Google cloud because some combination of key got leaked or my homelab got compromised, and the attacker consumed tens of thousands in gemini usage in only a few hours. It wasn't even the same Google project as for my project, it was another that hasn't seen activity in a year+.

Google refuses to apply any adjustments, their billing specialist even mixed up my account with someone else, refuses to provide further information for why adjustments are being rejected, refuses any escalation, etc. I already filed a complaint with the FTC and NYS attorney General but the rep couldn't care any less.

My gripe is not that the key was potentially leaked or compromised or similar and then I have to pay as a very expensive "you messed up" mistake, it's that they let an api key rack up tens of thousands in maybe 4 hours or so with usage patterns (model selection, generating text vs image, volume of calls, likely different IP and user agent and whatnot). That's just predatory behavior on an account marked as individual/consumer (not a business).

by hak8or

4/23/2026 at 4:42:43 AM

Recommend switching to Hezner, they have hard billing limits.

This current cloud paradigm of charging indefinitely is insane for normal consumers and many businesses.

by danny_codes

4/23/2026 at 6:53:56 AM

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

by ramon156

4/23/2026 at 12:06:10 AM

GCP is turning into a circus.

Right now there are about 4 concurrent threads on the googlecloud subreddit about people getting hosed with life changing bills. Some no doubt through stupid mistakes (happens), but still bewildering that Google is insisting individuals like students are subject to the same scale to infinity bills as huge corporations and are unwilling to provide any mechanism to protect hobbyists.

And then people tell you but there are quotas and then:

>Google automatically upgraded it to the next level when the account crossed the $1,000 threshold during the incident.

by Havoc

4/22/2026 at 6:43:39 PM

Why doesn’t GCP provide a way to say “shut down all my services if my cap is reached”?

by victor106

4/23/2026 at 9:06:29 AM

Because there's money in letting people make mistakes on their own dime.

For every story about a mistake in the tens of thousands, I wonder how many there are in the single-thousands, hundreds and even tens where people just suck it up and pay the bill. When you provide such a limited billing support surface, employ a thousand lawyers in-house, and hold as many cards as Google does (losing my G account would ruin my year).

Multinational service providers need better regulation to ensure consumers' rights are protected. In the UK utilities and banks have to absorb (or insure) against some leaks, theft and external fraud. If Google (and others!) were subjected to similar regulation, problems like this would evaporate overnight.

by oliwarner

4/22/2026 at 8:08:06 PM

They have a $18,000 reason for that.

by brazukadev

4/22/2026 at 8:23:20 PM

Well since they waived the fees, it sounds to me like they have an $18,000 reason to stop this kind of thing from happening in the first place.

I understand that $18k is probably a drop in the bucket, but surely there's a middle ground here.

by caminanteblanco

4/22/2026 at 8:30:22 PM

They can wave 18k pretty easily because they'll make it up in 18,000 other overcharges of varying amounts that aren't contested. Or that are corporate clients that just eat it.

Things like this are the exact reason that companies end up having to comply with all kinds of regulations. It's just easier to screw the customer first.

by pixl97

4/22/2026 at 9:13:42 PM

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.

by estimator7292

4/23/2026 at 4:32:03 AM

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?

by rcbdev

4/23/2026 at 9:10:31 AM

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.

by oliwarner

4/23/2026 at 5:26:35 AM

It may have changed but there are (or used to be) gym memberships that would only let you cancel if you could prove that you moved and your new primary residence was more than one hour from the nearest branch. (I'm pretty sure there was a law passed to end this practice, but it was widespread)

by fluidcruft

4/23/2026 at 5:21:16 AM

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 as I had the membership around 30 years ago, but they still in general do not allow cancellation at the physical location. You must write to them.

Edit: I just read that they all transitioned to LA Fitness now, and I'm not sure what their policies are but Bally's, while unethical and infamous, were not illegal as far as I know.

by untrue-lies

4/23/2026 at 1:56:27 PM

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?

by senordevnyc

4/22/2026 at 10:25:15 PM

Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers. All workloads using that billing account would be impacted immediately.

If they weren't turned off at the billing cap, but were given some leeway instead, either that becomes the new hard limit, or GCP will have to give away the difference.

And there's no "middle ground" you could implement that makes sense either - like a "frozen" state. Preventing new writes to a GCS bucket breaks the writer app. Freezing VMs serving web traffic takes the site down.

Even if the service was shut down once the billing limit is hit, how long would GCP wait for the user to add funds or raise the limit? GCP would need to either keep the services in a hidden/frozen state or not turn them off / freeze them at all (in which case GCP would be giving away resources for free).

Maybe GCP can give users a heads-up when they're about to hit the limit? GCP already does - billing alerts do exist. It's just possible to blow past them if your usage is a massive spike.

Moreover, getting the hundreds of GCP services to implement a "frozen" state is difficult. It's hard enough getting everyone to listen to the "billing account disabled" signal, and (soft-)delete the resources (based on the resource, after some time interval). Given these billing overruns happen for smaller customers, it's not really worth solving the problem - which I don't think has a great solution to begin with.

by pradn

4/23/2026 at 12:08:14 AM

>Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.

That's why you make it opt in with suitable disclaimers about data loss from deletions (a warning which btw GCP already shows you when you disable billing on an active project).

I'd say the average person is well positioned to determine whether they're a broke student that can't afford a $1000 surprise or a corporation that needs reliability above all.

by Havoc

4/22/2026 at 11:19:12 PM

> Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.

Those customers that would rather get a surprise $18,000 bill than have their servers stopped or data nuked, can simply not enable the spending limit.

by like_any_other

4/23/2026 at 2:44:01 AM

> Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.

And yet this is exactly what happens if you exceed a quota limit, which aren't always well signposted and sometimes require days to get the limit raised. I've experienced multiple hours-long outages due to hitting GCP quotas we didn't know existed.

by ekimekim

4/22/2026 at 10:28:32 PM

Well they can give nuclear option and freeze everything. And they can send email every day till 7 days?

There is better option here, but google won't as it will hurt their incentive to take more money from customer.

by cute_boi

4/22/2026 at 10:37:01 PM

We got a $12,000 bill a few hours ago on a presumably leaked gemini API which I very much doubt, and we are trying to resolve the issue with a real support agent. I think they messed something internally and customers are getting these bills.

by symisc_devel

4/22/2026 at 9:36:51 PM

"Google automatically upgraded the tier" this is a google scam. don't pay and sue them.

by fhn

4/23/2026 at 4:32:56 AM

Google is in dire need of more consumer protection lawsuits.

by rcbdev

4/22/2026 at 11:40:05 PM

I never got a surprise bill myself, but reading a few cases like this motivated me to cancel my GCS account and remove my CC. Now if I try to use it it fails immediately with an error.

As author of HashBackup, I know people are using it with GCS, and I'd like to be able to test against it, but not enough to swallow a large surprise Google bill.

by prirun

4/22/2026 at 9:28:48 PM

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

by robotswantdata

4/23/2026 at 9:15:49 AM

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

by Havoc

4/22/2026 at 10:55:40 PM

You still owe a debt, even with no card on file.

by 0cf8612b2e1e

4/23/2026 at 4:39:02 AM

If Google really is stupid enough to send collectors for this, they have every right to be sued for obviously deceptive business practices.

by rcbdev

4/23/2026 at 4:45:05 AM

Dangerous litigation for Google to get into. I assume they’d prefer to settle out of court or comp you

by danny_codes

4/22/2026 at 11:38:14 PM

And Google owes honoring the budget limits no?

by gonzalohm

4/23/2026 at 5:45:46 AM

When disconnected all services immediately stop. So no big bills.

by robotswantdata

4/22/2026 at 8:20:46 PM

Sounds like a great mistake for Google to find a way to repeat. Why innovate when you can abuse users and hide behind "complexity" as "plausible deniability"?

You'll all keep using them either way.

by ddtaylor

4/22/2026 at 5:14:11 PM

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

by ReptileMan

4/22/2026 at 6:07:33 PM

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...

by dpoloncsak

4/22/2026 at 6:19:55 PM

The only way I can read that is 'setting a cap does nothing' but reading that tells me that it only turns on email notifications. Not any better really. It's simply not a cap. It's an alarm.

by Telaneo

4/22/2026 at 6:22:06 PM

Yes, there is no way to set a budget for Google Cloud. And alarms are delayed up to two hours (!)

by sunaookami

4/22/2026 at 7:46:50 PM

Agreed. I don't agree with the underlying design decisions either, but you literally set a "Budget Alert" on Google Cloud. It's designed to be an alarm, not a cap. I was just trying to point that out

by dpoloncsak

4/23/2026 at 4:46:28 AM

IMO it’s deceptive to market it as a cap. It’s genuinely confusing.

The service page should read “we can charge you an unlimited amount at any time if you make a technical mistake”

by danny_codes

4/23/2026 at 3:38:45 PM

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.

by stevenicr

4/22/2026 at 8:15:33 PM

I am fairly sure that this is antipattern on purpose. If you ask a thousand people on the street what a budget means - they will coalesce on - the money I am willing to spend on something.

The fact that google redefine what budget means and put a warning doesn't make it ok.

by ReptileMan

4/22/2026 at 10:16:22 PM

Even if US clouds will make more money per capita in the US it has more total income and political advantage from the other 95% of people. US law will be as pro-consumer as Delaware law. (And it will be as restricted to the jurisdiction that decides it as IP law.)

by torvoborvo

4/22/2026 at 6:23:15 PM

Click here to let the puppy life*

* By clicking here you agree to kill it

And you're defending that?

by 7bit

4/22/2026 at 7:45:36 PM

No, I think Google should provide easy tools to actually cap spending, instead of recommending you set quota limits on your APIs.

The article, and the comment I was replying to, make it seem like an error in the Google Budget system. I'm simply trying to say this system is working as designed and documented.

by dpoloncsak

4/23/2026 at 3:15:28 AM

This problem exists to some degree for all cloud services. Is there a solution based on the credit card used? Can you get a CC that has a hard limit guarantee?

EDIT: I guess that you'd still be responsible for the charges though.

by abrookewood

4/23/2026 at 4:44:17 AM

Hezner is the solution, since you can set hard billing limits there.

by danny_codes

4/22/2026 at 6:20:16 PM

I think I read somewhere that calculating and limiting cloud usage costs is a really hard problem. But I feel that if Google were motivated to do it, they can do it. It's hard, not impossible. They just don't care to solve this particular problem.

by perryizgr8

4/22/2026 at 6:47:58 PM

If they can COUNT it and charge based on that, that means they can count it and react.

If I, not having their budget or engineers, can have pretty much instant Prometheus event reacting to metrics, surely it wouldn't be too hard for them to have triggers like this -- somehow their AI can automatically ban people based on something, can't they do something for the customers?

They can, just don't want to.

by subscribed

4/22/2026 at 8:05:58 PM

In the article it states that this person had an account that would have been limited to $2000 in usage.

And the system automatically upgraded them to higher spending limits when they crossed the $1000 in usage costs.

They could definitely make that an opt-in feature.

by mhitza

4/22/2026 at 8:31:53 PM

Yea, makes no sense for it to be opt out. Otherwise it just means there are no limits.

by pixl97

4/22/2026 at 6:27:10 PM

It's the same fundamental problem as view counters, something Google is famously good at solving. Eventually consistent solutions are well-understood, and wouldn't have these kinds of massive cost-overruns.

by AlotOfReading

4/22/2026 at 6:39:22 PM

Depends on latency. 24 hour delays on an eventually consistent counter used for billing absolutely would cause this problem.

by lazide

4/22/2026 at 7:03:35 PM

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 "autoscale this set of VMs" and "my budget cap is $1000/hour", with the VM type being priced at $10/hour, translated to "autoscale to at most 100 instances". That would need dev work (i.e. this feature being considered important) and would not respect the budget cap in a cross-service way automatically, but still it is another piece in the puzzle.

by moring

4/23/2026 at 6:20:55 AM

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.

by lazide

4/24/2026 at 6:10:35 AM

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.

by moring

4/22/2026 at 7:28:02 PM

Yeah, there's an implicit assumption was reasonability.

But a big part of the value in large clouds like GCP is the network's interconnectedness. Plus even if there was some global event that made communications impossible only for the billing service, I'd still expect charges to top out roughly proportional to the number of partitions as they each independently exceed the threshold. GCP only has 120ish zones.

by AlotOfReading

4/22/2026 at 10:23:28 PM

It's more a problem they are incentivized to have. Open Router allows fixed wallets and doesn't run into the same problem, since it would be their money on the line if they let a user overspend their limits.

by cma

4/22/2026 at 6:48:38 PM

It’s hard on AWS as well, but I agree. There’s just no incentive for the billing experience to be better.

by jdgoesmarching

4/22/2026 at 8:45:39 PM

aws, gcp, azure (the ones I work with), they don't provide a off the shelf solution to block after some budget ammount. This is not aceptable.

by ricardorivaldo

4/22/2026 at 9:24:46 PM

They charge for a lot of things "by the hour". Things like S3, load balancers, storage.

Deleting those when a customer hits a limit will lose customer data or remove things that might be hard to add back. The "I hit my AWS limit and they deleted all my data" headlines will result.

and excluding those things makes the limit soft again..

by slyall

4/23/2026 at 4:47:58 AM

Maybe relying on one company to store all the data your company has is a terrible idea

by danny_codes

4/22/2026 at 8:06:40 PM

I mean yes, look at Corey Quinn [1] for example. He has built an entire career out of the fact that cloud billing trips people up.

(Generally, tech seems to skate by on creating insanely complicated things, knowing that given enough pain, people will start blogging about their solutions, ie effectively outsourcing the cost and effort of doing something about it.)

[1] https://www.lastweekinaws.com/

by kjellsbells

4/23/2026 at 4:50:06 AM

Tech skates by on monopoly/oligopoly power. This arises because big players are allowed to buy competitors whenever they like. And since they are already monopolies/duopolies, they have unlimited money for such purposes. Killing off WhatsApp was chump change for Facebook.

We essentially don’t have monopoly enforcement in the US anymore

by danny_codes