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Google Cloud Charged Me $1000 For This Mistake

A story about when I was charged a whopping amount of ₹78000 (approx. $1000) for using a GCP service without my knowledge.

Kunal Vaidya
5 min readJul 22, 2022
Image source — https://www.contino.io

In February 2021, one day I woke up to an automated email from Google Cloud Services. Initially, I ignored it as I get a lot of service monitoring emails from Google Cloud, as a part of my other projects hosted on the platform. Later on, I received another mail with the subject of “Your invoice is available for the month of February”. This time I didn’t ignore the mail because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be billed for the services, as I was using the services which were a part of the “Free Tier” offered by the platform during the trial period.

The email said that I have been charged for using the Google AutoML service for 30 days and the billed amount is ₹ 78,000. I was stunned. I remembered using the service for 1–2 days, a month ago, as a part of a side project. So, without further ado, I went to the Google Cloud console to check the consumption in detail.

To talk about the AutoML service, AutoML lets you build custom Machine Learning models…

Kunal Vaidya
Kunal Vaidya

Written by Kunal Vaidya

I write about tech, finance and life experiences. Join me in the journey of solving problems and growing together.

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