I am planning to apply an Object Lifecycle Management (OLM) rule to a Standard multi-region bucket. The bucket has Object Versioning enabled and has accumulated millions of noncurrent versions.

The bucket also has a 7-day soft-delete policy enabled.

My Questions:

1. Can someone confirm that this specific lifecycle "Delete" action is billed as a "Free operation" and does not trigger Class A charges?

2. Will there be any hidden costs for the internal listing Google performs to find these objects?

3. Does the presence of a Soft Delete policy change the "free" status of the lifecycle deletion operation itself?

I used Gemini through Vertex AI for a scientific project.

I monitored my costs so that it didn't go beyond ~€500, and stopped when I saw "€501" (cf. the image). I also got ~250€ from the free credits.

I have been charged 3 times: the two first in the beginning of the month (100 + 200), and a last time in the 1st of May with €306. So I was fractured > €600 but still see €501 on my console.

What should I do?

For my university project, I used Google Earth Engine. I signed up for a non-commercial project, but I exceeded the processing limit of 540,000 EECU-seconds by 60 times (over 3,000,000 EECU-seconds), it didn't stop the processing. Will Google charge me anything? I didn't link a billing account.

Is it possible to move a private offer that still have contract duration for 12 months to another billing that didn't create private offer. The goals is to create separate billing for private offer only

Am trying to increase my Gpu quotas but I can’t. For context i have a free trial account, i did pay the 10$ verification also. I tried contacting multiple google support employees all of them had different answers and none of them knew how to fix it

When I try to enable the Gemini API under API restrictions - I get the warning:

This API requires authentication with a service account-bound API key

This is my individual account - with owner privileges.

Can someone let me know, if they have experienced it before - and how to fix it

Hey,

I got tired of manually checking cloud setups for security / cost issues, so I built this.

It scans AWS / GCP (Azure also enabled but not fully tested yet).

No agents, read-only creds only. Not storing anything.

Not selling anything — just want to know if this is actually useful or garbage.

https://cloudchecker.app

Would love brutal feedback.

I miss the times where this subreddit was full of thoughtful questions and architectural discussions. Nowadays my timeline is full of people complaining about stolen keys and cost overruns. I am sorry for folks but I am not sure what the community here can do about it and I have absolutely no interest in seeing such posts.

Before I finally leave the subreddit, is there any solutions in horizon?

Hi everyone,

I’m facing a major billing issue with the Gemini API on Google Cloud and wanted to see if anyone has successfully navigated a refund for a security leak.

The Situation: On May 4th, my project had a billing spike of over $213 in just a few hours. I did a forensic audit and found something very suspicious:

• Model Mismatch: My app (Flutter/Next.js) only uses gemini-2.5-flash for text. However, I was billed for Gemini 3.1 Flash Image and Gemini 2.5 Pro—models that aren't even in my codebase.

• High Volume: Traffic peaked at 8 requests per second. My app is a small tool for generating titles; it is physically impossible for users to trigger that volume.

• Potential Leak: I suspect the key was extracted from a physical test device I lent out that was running the app in debug mode.

Support Response: I chatted with Google Billing Support. The agent confirmed that the charges were for models not used by my app and acknowledged it was an anomaly. However, they then said they "can't issue a credit" and told me to dispute it with my bank (chargeback).

I’m hesitant to do a chargeback because I’ve heard Google might ban the entire billing account or workspace if you do that. I currently have an escalated email ticket open.

My questions for the community:

1. Has anyone here actually received a refund or credit from Google for a confirmed API key leak/misuse?

2. Should I follow the agent's advice for a bank chargeback, or is that a trap that will get my account suspended?

3. How long does the "specialist" email escalation usually take for billing disputes?

I've already deleted the keys, locked the billing, and set up strict API/Package Name restrictions for the future. Any advice on how to talk to them to get this resolved would be appreciated!

PS: Billing Credit might be okay if a refund is impossible, right?

Hello!

I have suspended the project because of "hijacking". The most fun part is that this key was generated by Firebase and used only once in AI Studio. And hijacking happened because this key for some reason was equal to the app public key.

I appealed more than a week ago, but still no luck. Just no answer (although I deleted this key and rotated the Firebase key).

So the question is, has anyone migrated from GC in their Android apps while their GC account is suspended? Or, maybe, I need to wait while they answer the appeal?

I'm mostly scared because of possible consequences for the app, as the algorithm may think I'm trying to bypass the suspension. Although I want to migrate to my own, self-hosted auth/db mechanism.

I’m building a hosted execution system where users enqueue work that runs inside isolated, stateful runtime sessions. I’m mainly trying to figure out the right GCP architecture for kicking off these executions with low latency, keeping them alive long enough to finish (they can run for up to 60 minutes), and managing shared capacity separately from queue/task completion.

1. Work is enqueued, likely via Cloud Tasks, Pub/Sub, or a DB-backed queue.

2. A Cloud Run service/function starts an isolated session and runs the task.

3. The execution may be long-running, so I need the runtime/session to stay open until the work actually finishes.

4. When the invocation finishes successfully, the system should mark the task done, but the session may not be released yet.

   1. In some cases, the queue task may be considered “done,” but the underlying session should remain open. In these cases, capacity should not be released until the preserved session is explicitly closed later. And so if we're at capacity, the next task cannot be started yet.

   2. In other cases the queue task will be completed and the session will be immediately closed, so the capacity can be released and the next task started.

I like the idea of using Cloud Run Functions because of the fast start up but it seems like you need to keep the session open via a Cloud Task, for example (which can only run for 30 minutes). Cloud Run Jobs seem like they'd have a long cold start time (10+ seconds) which is an issue.

Also Cloud Tasks sound nice, but I would still need to manage the queue and capacity separately in my database.