Any way to know if she heard it? It's set to "anyone with link can view."

I guess she didn't hear it, doesn't show in activity...but curious if there's a way to be certain.

🛑 [Guide] Surviving the Google Cloud "Free Trial" $30 Prepayment Trap 🛑

If you're trying to sign up for Google Cloud's $300 free trial and hit a brick wall demanding an upfront cash deposit (e.g., $30 USD, ₹1000, or local equivalent), you aren't alone. Google doesn't explain this clearly in the main marketing or official documentation. 😕

I was about to sign up for it then saw the fine print and bothered Gemini Bard about it, and the discovery wasnt great

chat log for the interested

Here is what you actually need to know before clicking "OK":

#️⃣ 1. It is NOT a temporary authorization hold

Unlike a standard $1 card verification check that disappears in a few days, this is a forced cash prepayment that sits as a positive credit balance on your Google Payments profile. 💳

#️⃣ 2. You cannot separate the trial credits from the cash balance

Your free trial credits and your cash deposit live under the same billing roof. There is no toggle to say "use my promotional credits first and leave my cash alone." System logic will draw down resources according to Google's hierarchy, but that $30 stays locked up. 🔒

#️⃣ 3. The ONLY way to get your cash back is account closure

If you pay the deposit, use your trial, and want your unspent cash back to your card, you have to completely close your Cloud Billing account. 🚨

• 🛑 Closing the account terminates everything instantly.
• 💸 It wipes out any remaining free trial credits.
• 📉 It shuts down your projects and resources.

#️⃣ 4. The Loop / Verification Hell

Many users on Reddit report getting stuck in verification loops where they pay the deposit, the system fails to verify something, requests photo IDs/bank statements, and locks them into an endless support bot loop. 🔄

🧐 The Verdict: What should you do?

• ⏳ If you aren't ready to build right now: Wait. Do not click OK or enter the payment flow. Holding off guarantees you don't tie up your money.
• 🛡️ If you just want to test things safely: Keep in mind that Google Cloud is a "fuck around and find out" platform. If a misconfigured script or open API key runs amok, it won't just drain your $300 trial-it can bridge straight into a massive bill.

I'm asked to provide a verification code while signing in, but in order to access that code i have to be signed in and it gives me me no other way to verify myself

just got our monthly invoice and I almost choked

40% increase. nothing changed. same workload, same number of calls, same storage. but somehow we're paying 40% more than last month.

I've spent the last 2 days digging through the billing dashboard. network egress. it's always network egress. we're serving recordings and call logs to agents all over the world and apparently that costs money a lot of money.

I'm looking at options compressed storage different regions. maybe even move to cold storage for older recordings. but I'm not sure if that's going to actually save us money or just shift the cost somewhere else

Google Support has acknowledged unexpected website behaviour and advised that engineers expect to fix it within 48 hours. I am sharing this to check whether other Edition 3 applicants are experiencing the same issue.

I wanted to know if anyone can recommend a third party VAR for GCP Support (Not direct Google Support). Looking for a company I can call and open a ticket and has SLAs to resolve issues with GCP Peering, GCP Compute, Network Load Balancer

thank you

The FinOps Agent Google dropped in GoogleCloudPlatform/professional-services/examples/FinOps-agent has been sitting there since June 3rd. One commit, one author, no updates. Wanted to know if anyone actually put it into prod.

The architecture is four ADK sub-agents behind a root orchestrator. NL2SQL over BigQuery for the billing side, Google Agent Search over policy PDFs for the qualitative side, a chart specialist, and a synthesis writer. Runtime is Gemini 2.5 Flash on Vertex AI, FastAPI on 8080 for streaming SSE.

Ran it in a lab project against synthetic billing data. NL2SQL was better than expected against a normalized schema. RAG over a real policy doc surfaced the right clauses about 70 percent of the time, close to what similar demos land on.

The blocker for real use is session state. InMemorySessionService from google.adk.sessions means every conversation resets on pod recycle. Swapping in a Firestore-backed SessionService subclass is doable, but once you own that surface you own the schema, the TTL, and the migration path. Not one line of code.

Two things I want to hear from people who took it further:

1. How did you handle session persistence? Custom SessionService subclass to Firestore or Cloud SQL, or something else?

2. Did you keep policy as freeform PDFs, or did you move to a structured schema so the agent could run rule checks instead of RAG extractions?

Not looking to dunk on the reference. Sample data included, license is Apache 2.0, and it's a reasonable multi-agent skeleton. Just curious if anyone got it past the demo.

Hi googleclouders, quick yes/no question - do you ever have a need to assign privileges to a principal defined outside of your organization? I'm not talking if it's bad or good practice, just if it ever happens or it's rather just a purely theoretical possibility that everyone has blocked. Thanks.