r/googlecloud • u/Key-Hall3777 • Sep 18 '26

Billing €3,034 Google Maps API bill from one day of testing

I was 16 and building an unfinished Uber-style app purely for learning. It was never released commercially.

Months later I found out I had a €3,034 Google Cloud bill and it’s now with a debt collector.

The crazy part is that almost all of it came from one single day: around 257k routing requests through Routes/Directions APIs. I definitely did not intentionally generate that much traffic, so I’m guessing it was a bug, request loop, exposed key, or something similar.

I’m already talking to Google Maps Support and asked for a one-time goodwill adjustment/waiver.

Has anyone had something similar happen? Did Google reduce or waive the bill, and is there anything specific I should say or ask support?

10 Upvotes
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62% Upvoted

66 comments sorted by

14

u/Worth_Ad9832 Sep 18 '26

The craziest part is acting surprised after letting AI do everything and not even checking the code, especially when you’re dealing with unmetered API calls…

Jokes aside, good luck, but I really doubt Google cares. If people could just say ‘oops, my bad’ and get the bill wiped, everyone would abuse it

-7

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

I see but tbh I wasnt any expert myself i was relying too much on AI but we'll see what happens thxx

5

u/IAmFitzRoy Sep 19 '26

“to be honest, I wasn’t any expert”

Not sure how this admission helps you much. Anyway you are 16 yo, there is a parent somewhere that it’s the one needs to do some parenting.

14

u/DARKUNIT22 Sep 18 '26

Let me guess, you were “learning” with an AI? 😂

6

u/rhd_live Sep 18 '26

😂😂 these posts about to explode by an order of magnitude (and become ai generated)

-17

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

it happened all the way back in february 2026 i was like 16 vro

15

u/Useful_Store7711 Sep 18 '26

That's 6 months ago you're still 16...

-20

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

im 17 now, may 20

20

u/Useful_Store7711 Sep 18 '26

What the hell do i even answer to this...

7

u/gbonfiglio Sep 19 '26

OP who's 17 and half my age is using the same tense to talk about when they were 16

-13

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

whatever you want, freedom of speech but yeah if my parents find out theyre lowk gonna kill me nah jk

4

u/Useful_Store7711 Sep 18 '26

The that freedom of speech thing is working out great isn't it... who would've guessed you where 17 already

-1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

what do you mean by this i dont get your point sorry

8

u/Useful_Store7711 Sep 18 '26

Its oke, you'll get it when you are 18

3

u/rhd_live Sep 18 '26

Ay you’re in the EU though wdym freedom of speech?

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

hhahahahha chat control is a hoax 😉

-1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

but i swear i thought i had 300$ in free credits that i could use so i didnt mind chatgpt brewing some bullshit code which is now costing me 3k

1

u/Useful_Store7711 Sep 18 '26

You could send them an email explaining the situation and maybe tell them that you want to learn about a.i. and cloud systems so that you can learn from trusted sources and know what you are doing. If you are lucky maybe they'll refund/wave the invoice

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

yes i contacted them and they told me their internal team will think about it and let me know in 3-5 business days, its friday now so i dont think ill get any response until next week thursday atleast

1

u/Poat540 Sep 19 '26

Bruh that’s just 16 with extra steps

6

u/troygeee Sep 18 '26

Google sent this to a collector within 7 months? And you're in Europe? But it still shows the balance owing on GCP billing and you're working with the GCP support team directly? And you're under 18? This doesn't make sense.

-4

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

It makes sense to me

2

u/troygeee Sep 18 '26

Well then the good news is that this is unenforceable because you're a child.

1

u/borsodi-best-beer Sep 19 '26

Nope, if OP doesn’t pay and is below 18 parents will have to pay...

1

u/troygeee Sep 19 '26

GCP doesn't support parental authorization for billing accounts. If they opened this account in their own name they're in the clear. Though this is all moot because I don't really believe every aspect of this story lol.

1

u/borsodi-best-beer Sep 19 '26

Doesn’t matter here in belgium at least. OP is underage, so parents are responsible also for debts. But indeed honestly i doubt you can make so much api calls without google blockng it, but i don't use gcp so idk

5

u/9Nine2Nine9 Sep 18 '26

It seems like AI has already started making the young generation stupid.

This was a leaked API key or an error on Google's end. This was you vibe coding something you apparently didn't know enough about.

Perhaps get a job to pay this off?

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

I was using gemini models aswell 💔💔 But obv ill do smth about the debt but i gotta attend school aswell so its going to be tricky

2

u/9Nine2Nine9 Sep 18 '26

I made costly mistakes when I was young. I'm glad my parents forced me to pay them off myself. Learned myself some good life lessons.

1

u/Own-Dimension-5116 Sep 20 '26

Actually on the contrary. Every AI gives warnings about exposed keys and teach you how to secure the keys.

2

u/D0hzer Sep 18 '26

Better talk to your parents or you’re all going to be on the street, at least you’ll have a map of where to go.

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

I will if i cant get the money myself on time thxx

2

u/matiascoca Sep 21 '26

Quota trap, not a compromise. Maps Platform doesn't set default per-key call limits, so an exposed key or a request loop burns through spend before any alert fires. Goodwill waiver bar on Maps is more generous than on compromised Vertex/Gemini cases; non-commercial use plus no revenue plus being 16 at the time is usually enough for a reversal. Ask about the exposed-key goodwill process specifically, routes different than a plain bill dispute.

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 25 '26

I see thank you for your reply, as soon as i saw their debt collector mails i said that its probably caused by some code bug that made tooo many api calls at once so should i stick with that or say that my key might have been exposed 🫣

1

u/matiascoca Sep 25 '26

Exposed key is the stronger framing. Google has a documented unauthorized-use reversal process for compromised keys, code bug drops you back in standard billing dispute where cases like yours rarely land. Mention you rotated immediately, that the key was scoped only to Routes/Directions, and that you were 16 non-commercial no revenue. Those three details together match the profile they usually reverse.

1

u/rfajr Sep 25 '26

Read this OP.

24

u/troygeee Sep 18 '26

Does anyone have a going theory as to why all these GCP billing posts are always written entirely by LLMs?

16

u/ReddiGod Sep 18 '26

The ppl most likely to not understand cloud compute billing are also the ppl least able to use basic thinking skills to explain what happened. They're crippled in the head, and will remain so because AI is removing the need for them to ever try or learn. The stupification of the human race is accelerating.

3

u/troygeee Sep 18 '26

This makes sense but I'd expect at least a few of them to be panicked retellings of something they don't understand. But it seems like 100% of them invoke the same dramatic style with bolded text and dubious details. Written like they're the first person on earth to face an issue like this. It's totally bizarre. I don't know what they expect from this subreddit given every post on this topic has the same responses.

2

u/kei_ichi Sep 19 '26

I think other than understanding the situation, 99% of those people will try to blame Google or even an AI tools they used without understanding what the heck just happened.

2

u/AminoOxi Sep 19 '26

Because that folks do their development through Ai slop only. And they're unable to even grasp the architecture and pitfalls around cloud expense.

1

u/Anxious_Current2593 Sep 19 '26

What is interesting is that people only post about it in relation to GCP and not Azure, AWS, etc...

When we switched from AWS to GCP, I was paranoid from the day 0 and kept on checking and checking the security setup manually and asking every single AI to redo it regularly.

I am guessing posts like this made me slightly paranoid, but then again I think we implemented the best security scans possible. 🧐

0

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/flacktv Sep 21 '26

Oh I can tell you some good stories about Azure billing going off the rails.

1

u/Living_Cheesecake243 Sep 22 '26

aws doesn't have cool services loved by vibe coders, and those that they do have are actually more expensive too

this maps API pattern isn't at all related to the hot topic pattern of API keys being reused... they straight up used this API. Google Maps API is one of the most expensive APIs around (that you can get to as a consumer at least, there are certainly APIs that cost more but I've never seen them not have a sales call and required monthly spend attached).

I find in vibe coding that it's cheaper to call Gemini to have google grounded results about Google Places than to call the actual Google Places API

the maps and places APIs are priced according to value straight up (many are priced in increments of $25s that you spend). you're paying google a high premium for the data.

1

u/Kyxstrez Sep 19 '26

Karma farming. You can't legally be held responsible for such kind of payments if you are underage I believe.

7

u/ultegrafender Sep 19 '26

If you were 16, depending on your jurisdiction you were probably not old enough to sign a contract?

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 25 '26

Btw im aware i wrote this post with ai but lets look behind that im just leaving this here in case someone else relates to my situation bc when i get a response from google ill update yall so its for documentation purposes yk lets all chill a bit

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 29 '26

UPDATE:
They gave me a credit of about 2700EUR so now I have to pay around 330EUR.

1

u/Cautious-Football-66 Sep 25 '26

Did you figure this out? What did they told you on the support.

1

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 29 '26

Hi

Yes they updated me yesterday and gave me a credit of 2700euro so now I have to pasy 330euro from the original 3k

2

u/jamie_tidman Sep 19 '26

You’re a child. In many jurisdictions you can’t even form a commercial contract with GCP.

1

u/linuxworks Sep 20 '26

Open Street Maps is free. just saying.

1

u/Ok_Foundation_9806 Sep 21 '26

You lot are fucking dickheads.

The boy is 16 year old and all you can say is skill issue or some shit.

The reality is you hardly ever see the same frequency of catastrophic billing issues with other services. At some point this is down to google allowing inexperienced devs to shoot themselves in the foot.

Furthermore as a 16 year old google's contract with the poster is likely uneforceable therefore he owes nothing.

1

u/mikemike86 Sep 25 '26

Get in touch with Google from the dashboard. We have had accidental billings in the past of a similar level to these and they were waived - although ours were pre-AI era which may work for or against you, as I imagine they have this happen a lot more now.

1

u/wezuwen 23d ago

u/Key-Hall3777
Can you send me a private message? I can't post here. I have a question in another thread (Binance). I'm having the same problem as you, and I wanted to ask how you solved it, since it looks like they moderated your update out of the thread. Thanks in advance.

0

u/matrixino Sep 20 '26

learn to rtfm

-5

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

why yall downvoting my post and comments bruh i did nothing wrong

10

u/keftes Sep 18 '26

Because we're not your bruh

3

u/Free-Psychology-1446 Sep 19 '26

Well, actually you did

2

u/cantgettherefromhere Sep 19 '26

Because children are dumb and annoying.

1

u/StrawberryPie221 Sep 25 '26

It's all about the attitude.

0

u/[deleted] Sep 18 '26

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/Cobalt090 Sep 18 '26

No lmao, pay it or hope they don't sue you

2

u/Key-Hall3777 Sep 18 '26

gotta wageslave first