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

We're a tech startup on the Google for Startups program with $100k in credits. The workload is highly parallel scientific computing that we've containerised and run on Cloud Batch. Pipeline works, pilot runs fine. On a single VM the full run takes 5-6 days; on Batch with 1500-2000 Spot vCPUs it's about 6 hours.

Problem: our quota is stuck at <100 vCPUs and a tiny persistent disk allocation, and every increase request through the console gets denied within minutes. no reason given beyond the generic "not eligible at this time". We have $100k of credits we literally cannot spend.

we're stuck in a catch-22, can’t build spend history because we can't get quota, can't get quota without spend history.

So..

1. Did buying a paid support plan (Standard) and filing the quota request as a support case actually get you to a human?

2. Is there a functioning escalation path through the startup program itself? We got the credits through the program but it's not obvious who to contact about quota.

It feels absurd to be handed $100k and then rate-limited to compute smaller than my laptop.

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.

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'm a total noob, so let's get that on the record first thing. My only coding experience is using HTML tags when making my webpage on Angelfire or Geocities and updating my MySpace. So, like, no real practical experience.

I work for a small nonprofit with no budget for swanky computer stuff. I used Google Cloud to create a simple tool to keep track of who is in the building, what time(s) they came and left, that sort of thing. YES, apps for this exist, but they all seem to have a whole bunch of other functions that my company does not need. I just need to see who's here and who isn't, and to be able to see when they came and went.

Anyway, after multiple iterations Google created a functional app for me with some sample people in its roster. I published it, used the link it gave me, and then started updating the roster to have my actual members on it instead of the sample people Google used. This work all vanished when I closed the app and reopened it elsewhere.

I am clearly doing something wrong. I tried poking around in the Google Cloud Console and it says I don't have the right permissions to modify certain things. There is a "request permissions" feature but I don't know who to send the email to, since I built this using my personal Google account (do I ask myself for permissions?).

I was hoping this would be as simple as 1) tell Google what I need, 2) refine it until it works how I need it to, 3) publish it, 4) use it at the nonprofit's community center.

If anyone can help me, that would be mighty appreciated!

I'm using GCPStudyHub to prepare for the PCA exam and I'm finding the practice exam questions really hard to read. I need to really concentrate and read the question 3 or more times before I understand what is being asked. Sometimes I'm staring at the same question for several minutes.

Feels like I'm trying to extract the true question hidden inside a wall of text.

Anyone else here who has used GCPStudyHub have the same experience?

Are these questions representative of what would be on the exam? Cos if so I would definitely fail due to time.

We have multiple cloud run services which have rust code running in it to serve small web APIs. There is load at any given point of time but it varies by the time of the day.
Whenever we deploy a new revision by default the traffic is migrated to the service almost immediately. This leads to some issues related to latency and load.
The minimum instance field we have is generally set to 1 in all services so as to avoid forgetting about services with less load consuming more instances.
I want to change the deployment behavior such that I can set some minimum instance(around the same number of instance already being used for revision with traffic at that time) for a revision for initial 10 minutes and migrate the traffic once the instances are available instead of the other way around of increasing traffic and instances scaling by gcp logic.

We are yet to try the gradual ramp up, but I was looking for better solution of at least having specific number of instances beforehand.

hi
ive general cloud experience but limited hands on experience with GCP
is three days enough? (ive already booked the exam) also are there any reliable and up to date practice tests or exam d(you)Ⓜ️🅿️s?

Hi, i don't really know if this the correct place to ask but i hope to get insight and maybe if anyone ever get into the same case.

what happen:

1. I was playing with vertex and trying out different model, and after a while want to try claude api from vertex (now they called agent platform)

2. tried to activate the api and run some req, but getting no quota, manually request from console also give no upgrade at all, so

3. i tried contacting the sales support, asking for an increase quota for some sonnet and haiku model, I ask for just mere 20 rpm and 100k tpm output limit increase, because I am just trying out

4. few days later, as of today got an email from ai studio of my billing tier upgraded to tier 3

https://preview.redd.it/gzqn400tkvjh1.png?width=1647&format=png&auto=webp&s=a55dc52f6ec66427d8dc01d1c19a4e842d5d558a

5. I check on my gcp console, now i get the anthropic limit raised to a whopping lot of 2M input, 200k output, and 2k rpm

https://preview.redd.it/6lldf52flvjh1.png?width=1853&format=png&auto=webp&s=9debe3966cc109ffb661eb38d3deccb30c06162f

6. what scares me now that my limit are actually increased to the max limit of USD 100,000 and any random shit happen and it potentially ruin my finance.

https://preview.redd.it/urg5paexjvjh1.png?width=847&format=png&auto=webp&s=bcde642217a63a23bdb963316d9914a9d651d119

What i want to know

1. did anyone every get into this before?

2. can i actually downgrade to tier 1? as my spending actually small just 1-3usd per month on few months back

3. where can i get the support for this particular issue?

Thank in advance :)

I received an email from Google after trying to verify my app, and because it has restricted scopes, (i knew i would run into this issue), i have to pay to get it verified. However, this is my first application I have built, and can someone tell me why "AL1 (formerly Tier 2) CASA Assessment" costs $600? Is there any way to get around this or any cheaper alternatives, please let me know!

What’s the main difference between the GCA interview and the Googlyeness interview.

spent the last 3 months moving our entire phone system from some random hosted provider to GCP. compute, cloud sql, the whole thing it works it actually works. but every time I have to touch it I'm terrified I'll break something

we moved because the old provider was just too expensive for what we were getting. and honestly, the performance is better now. less latency, fewer issues.

the part that scares me is I'm not a telephony expert know GCP I know compute. I know networking. but I feel like I'm one misconfigured IAM policy away from a total disaster. like what if I accidentally delete the database with all the call logs. or what if the VM goes down and nobody can call us.

I tested everything. like a lot staging environment, load testing, failover testing. it all checks out. but I can't shake the feeling that something is going to blow up the moment I stop worrying about it.

I'm probably overthinking this but I can't be the only one who gets this way.

anyone else running their voice stuff on GCP and have horror stories or success stories to share. just to make me feel better or worse

I am pondering upon the idea and does not know the feasibility or if it saves a few bucks compared to the providers such as Deepseek, open code, etc.

Lets say if I dont mind whether my request is completed in 60seconds or 30 minutes. I could batch them and burst them in 30mins and then collect next batch.

In this case, one can use a VM with GPU and run vLLM or LiteLLM and serve models to my applications via a private API. Lets take GCP as an example L4 workstations come at under 1$/hour and A100s come at $2-3/hour depending on capacity. If I use a spot machine, I would get billed for only compute time.

The primary issues, I see are

1. my spot gets reclaimed and stuck with no spot. how does vLLM handle here? How should I handle my client ends here?
2. What kind of models can I serve on these machines? At this price, machines have a memory of around 100GB.
3. costs associated with storage will be there, depending on the size of the model. Also most cloud services charge for storage operations. Attaching disks, reading large models in spot machines can lead to unnecessary overheads.

What else can be the issue? Will it be economically feasible for a 20h usage per week.

Did anyone try something similar? What is your self-hosted non-local setup?

My company wants to do a tech exchange with Google for a small group of developers. The plan is to present an overview of Google AI capabilities, and provide resources (training, developer docs, support) so they can develop an MVP based on solution that could potentially be further developed for our clients.

I’m trying to come up with use cases for the tech exchange. I’ve have identified the domains (modernization, migration, AI development) and aligned it to Google’s tools like Gemini, LLM, BigQuery, etc. However, our business leads are worried my use cases are too specific and we won’t have the time or capacity to develop it during the tech exchange (7 weeks with 4-6 hours a week dedicated for this).

Does anyone have any resources or recommendations on how I can go about with this? Anyone with experience developing use cases for tech exchanges or hackathons?

I have spent many months prototyping an application that made good use of the inexpensive gemini-2.5-flash-lite.

I’ve just discovered it will be deprecated later in the year and I’ll have to migrate to gemini-3.1-flash-lite. This will 16x my LLM costs.

Then in May 2027 I’ll have to move to gemini-3.5-flash-lite at another price increase of 160%.

Is this just going to go on indefinitely? I’ve pretty much decided to abort my app as I’m guessing it will continue.

https://preview.redd.it/tj068f1g1cjh1.png?width=2107&format=png&auto=webp&s=35fb64e37f0fe01bc985df9e0407adee6f055cee

https://preview.redd.it/7a3lvq2k1cjh1.png?width=1695&format=png&auto=webp&s=da48778e9b362485b942eb4f05a59f1b7256cb40

My usage this month was around IDR 170.000 but I was charged IDR 3 million. Why is that?

The support bot said:

>Since your July usage (Rp 863,006) was already paid and your August usage is only (Rp 168,763), these charges of IDR 1,000,000 and IDR 2,000,000 processed today are highly likely due to one of the following reasons:

>Temporary Authorization Holds: When you update payment details, add a new card, or reach certain verification checkpoints, Google or your bank may place temporary authorization holds (often in round numbers like IDR 1,000,000 or 2,000,000) to verify your card's validity. These are not actual charges and will be automatically released back to your account by your bank within a few business days.

>Multiple Google Billing Accounts: If you use the same credit card for other Google services (such as Google Ads, Google Workspace, or a separate Google Cloud Billing account), these charges may have originated from those services.

Update: Turns out there is a loop that causes Routes API usage to spike up. I have contacted Billing Customer Service to help. Hope they can forgive my first mistake.