u/National_Raisin_1948

We are a very small startup in India with very sharp budget for cloud. Today we started receiving mandates unlimited times on my phone. On checking the billing dashboard, I saw a whopping transactions of more than 64lakhs INR and the charges are piling.

I contacted support but they said they are unable to help until 32 hours have passed and the data propagates to the console.

Kindly help us 🙏 we are in no position to manage cashflow of 1Lakh let alone nearly 1 crore.

I have disabled the gemini apis and deleted all api credentials. I also cancelled mandates and stopped the VMs. But the transactions keep piling up.

[Update]
If anyone has experienced similar issue, kindly let me know how you dealt. I have already raised support ticket but they say they are unable to help because there is no data recorded on console until 32hours have passed. I am really worried.

I checked in AI studio now the usage is finally visible. It started today at 6 AM IST and there were more than 4 million api calls majorly to nano banana. I have cleared the e mandates at least to avoid card charges later this week.

[Support Update]

I talked to the support. They have assured to raise a readjustment request. Lets see what happens

I’m an India-based backend/AI engineer (8+ years) currently contracting for a UK fintech alongside running my own company. Looking for honest input from this community on a few things, since most overseas-contractor content online is generic LinkedIn fluff.

A bit of context on me before the questions - I run mostly Java/Spring Boot, Node.js, Python/FastAPI, with deep PostgreSQL, Kafka, and Kubernetes experience. Currently building AI products (multi-model LLM routing, RAG, real-time streaming). My current UK rate sits around £300-400/day standard. Direct contracts, not via agency.

Things I’d genuinely value perspective on:

1. Rate benchmarking for overseas contractors - am I underselling? UK contractors I’ve talked to seem to quote significantly higher day rates, but I’m aware location-based pricing is contested. How do you think about this when working with UK SMEs vs enterprise?
2. Outside-IR35 structures - most of my engagements have been direct B2B (my India entity to the UK client). Anyone here worked both sides of this and seen meaningful differences in how clients approach overseas vs UK-resident contractors?
3. Finding outside-IR35 work specifically - agencies seem to mostly route inside-IR35 stuff. Where are people sourcing genuinely outside-IR35 contracts in 2026? Direct networks? Specific platforms? I tried LinkedIn but to no positive avail.
4. AI/LLM contract market in the UK - feels like there’s a gap between “we want AI” demand and engineers who’ve actually shipped production LLM systems (not just demos). Curious if others are seeing the same and what rates that work commands.

Happy to share more about what’s worked/not worked from my side.