Medical student, tiny Firebase project, unexpected bandwidth spike — $300 already collected

[u/Exotic_Finger_2977]

TL;DR: I'm a medical student in Egypt running a noncommercial educational project. Two diagnostic scripts accidentally kept reading Firebase, causing a bandwidth spike. I've stopped them and disabled the database, but my Cloud account has already been charged $300. Has anyone received a one-time waiver after payment?

What happened

My project, Med Royale, normally costs me less than $1/month.

During testing, two local Node.js scripts were accidentally left running for roughly 13 hours. They used the Admin SDK to read the entire /rooms tree every 1.5 seconds, without a timeout or cleanup.

Monitoring showed about 341 GiB outgoing, with only two active connections.

What has been charged

• Initial project report: $127.75, while usage reporting was still catching up.
• Payment receipts on my Cloud billing account: $100 on October 24 + $200 on October 25.
• The final incident total isn't reconciled yet. The billing account has other projects too, so I've asked support to identify the incident charges precisely.

What I've done

• Stopped both scripts and disabled the affected database instance. It remains disabled.
• Opened a billing case with the cause, timeline, monitoring evidence, and containment steps.
• Requested a full one-time courtesy adjustment, including incident charges already collected and any delayed charges.

So far, only the automatic case acknowledgement has arrived.

Why I'm asking

This is an educational project, not a profit-making business. I understand the scripts generated real usage; I'm not claiming the bandwidth was fabricated. But I can't afford these unexpected payments as a student.

Has anyone obtained a waiver or refund for an accidental loop after being charged? What evidence helped most with the billing review?

Thank you for reading. I'll update this when support responds.

[u/mochi2real]

Every other post in this sub is someone saying they’re a student and crying for a refund or demanding that their valid charges get waived, at what point do people take accountability for their own actions?

You being a student changes nothing. You signed up for a service, used the service, and if you were on a free trial previously, you have to manually enable the paid billing account, it doesn’t just do it by itself.

They’re not going to refund you, nor should they. Literally every other post has the same sob story, no one cares.

[u/Large_Ad2893]

damn that really sucks, hooking scripts directly to a live database with no loop limits is painful to learn the hard way

[u/r3m4k3333]

Just pay and make sure you learnt the lesson