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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.

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…