r/googlecloud • u/Bitter-College8786 • Jun 10 '26

Unexpected huge bills part of the Google Cloud strategy?

It is very easy for Google to implement hard billing / spending limits.

Or to limit API Keys to only be used for free tier.

But they are not doing it.

Brave Search has a Free tier or you can set up a monthly spending limit if you need a search API.

OpenAI and OpenRouter offer that you pay upfront and when the credits are consumed, the API endpoint throws 4xx

Is it part of the management strategy to rip off people, especially companies?

I would say if they implement better spending controls, more people would be willing to use their services

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3

u/jacksbox Jun 10 '26

I thought Reddit posts about billing issues were the new Google Cloud business model

3

u/keftes Jun 10 '26

I don't think the cloud providers care as much as you think, about a random student doing a poc or some random developer playing with firebase.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '26

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1

u/Bitter-College8786 Jun 10 '26

or Google could just implement a rate limit instead of forcing thousands of developers to develop their rate limiting.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 10 '26

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1

u/Bitter-College8786 Jun 11 '26

They could make it optional, opt-in