Hi everyone, I never thought I’d end up in this kind of situation, but here I am. I signed up for Google Cloud with my student email and was only using the $300 free credit they give you. Out of that, I had spent about $80. That’s it. I had more than $220 left and I wasn’t running anything serious, just doing small experiments for learning. On June 6, I accidentally pushed my API key to GitHub and I believed the repository was private (it was only visible in one commit, which I unfortunately didn't notice). At the time I didn't realize it, and since it was summer break, I wasn't even checking my student email. Then, on September 7, another GitHub user sent me a notification that my key had been public for a long time and others were abusing it. By that time, the damage was already done. When I checked my account, there was a $55,444 in total. After that, I immediately revoked the Gemini API key. This is a sum that I never spent, never confirmed, and, to be honest, I never even imagined it was possible. In total, I received only two invoices: the first was for $732 in June, however, the amount was not charged because my card had an expiration date of July 2025. If I had received a notification on my phone about a failed transaction, I would have immediately realized that something was wrong. But I didn't receive any such notification. The second invoice was for $31,000+ in August, and then an additional $21,000 was charged from September 1st to 7th. As soon as I discovered this, I immediately contacted Google Cloud Billing Support, filed a police report, and provided them with everything I could: usage logs, the GitHub links, screenshots all documents even when i revoked API key ,attackers sent 14200+ , with 100 % rate failed requests in just 2 days. I also explained that my card on file had already expired, so the money could not be directly charged. Google reviewed my case, but the final answer was that the charges remain in effect. They were polite and empathetic, but the decision was final. No cancellation, no changes. Now I am receiving notices that if I don't pay within 10 days, the debt will be transferred to a collections agency, with possible additional fees. Looking at the situation from another perspective:

• I never confirmed these charges.

• I was only using the free $300 credit.

• I was not checking my student email during summer break, so I did not know what was happening.

• My card had expired, so no money was ever charged. -I am a student from Georgia, where the average daily income is around $15.

• There is no way I can pay $55,000. This is much more than I will be able to earn in several decades.

I've seen posts online where Google forgave similar debts, sometimes fully, sometimes partially. This gives me a little hope, but in my case, I was not even given a symbolic relief. So I am asking: has anyone here ever dealt with such a large Google Cloud debt? Is there any way to escalate beyond the billing support team if the escalation manager told me that the decision is final? I am not trying to run away from responsibility, but I also don't want my life to be ruined because of something I didn't do myself. If anyone has advice, connections, or similar experience, I would be very grateful if you could write to me. And to any person starting to work with cloud services, please learn from my mistakes: protect your API keys, set spending limits, and check twice what you upload to GitHub. One small mistake can turn your life into a nightmare.

UPDATE 25 September -
I want to share some great news with you all. Following communication with the Google Cloud Billing Specialists, my case was reviewed again and the total outstanding balance has been completely waived !

I want to express my deepest gratitude to everyone for your sympathy and shared advice. Your support was very important to me.

I would also like to thank the Google Billing Specialist team for their service.

Thank you all again!

I am in a state of shock and panic right now.

Between Feb 11 and 12, our Google Cloud API Key was comprommised (We don't know how, we didn't find an obvious mistake) and generated generated $82,314.44 in charges.

Our normal monthly spend is $180.

455x more than normal.

The charges are almost entirely:

• Gemini 3 Pro Image

• Gemini 3 Pro Text

We immediately:

• Deleted the compromised key

• Disabled Gemini APIs

• Rotated credentials

• Enabled 2FA everywhere

• Locked down IAM

• Opened a support case

Google representative mentioned Google Cloud’s Shared Responsibility Model so... we have to charge you, which really worries me. If Google attempts to enforce even a third of this amount, our company goes bankrupt. We are barely surviving and hoping one of our products work. We are 3 developers in Mexico.

Here’s what I don't get...

Why are there no basic guardrails for catastrophic usage anomalies?

• No automatic hard stop at 5x or 10x historical usage

• No forced confirmation on extreme spikes

• No temporary freeze pending review

• No default per-API spending caps

A jump from $180/month to $82k in 48 hours is not “normal variability.” It is obvious abuse.

We are a small company. This bill exceeds our bank account my multiple times.

TLDR: Stolen Gemini API key caused $82,314 in charges in 48 hours. Our normal bill is $180/month (455x spike). We secured everything immediately, but Google is citing "Shared Responsibility". If enforced, we go bankrupt. Looking for advice from anyone who successfully disputed something similar.
Has anyone successfully disputed something like this? I already filed a cybercrime report with the FBI. And noticed around those days Chinese AI companies attacked US AI companies to distill the models.

Talking to the account manager tomorrow but so far they insists there is no option but paying.

Any advice from people who’ve survived something like this would be deeply appreciated.

UPDATE: Ive added some of the discussion points from the meeting https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/comments/1stn461/update_went_to_bed_with_a_10_budget_alert_woke_up/

This happened to me about a week ago. I've only ever posted about it on LinkedIn and honestly I don't really use Reddit so I never thought to share it here. But I keep seeing similar stories and I reckon this pattern of predatory billing behaviour needs to stop.

Theres alot more detail to it, i haven't covered off the entire story here this is just a summary.

I went to sleep normally. Woke up to a Google Cloud bill of $25,672.86.

My budget alert was set at $10.

In the time I was asleep, approximately 60,000 (only have the logs for these ) unauthorised API requests had been made on my account through a key I cannot identify. Google's investigation pointed to a specific API key as the source. That key does not exist anywhere in my project. I have 5 valid keys on this project. This is not one of them.

What the support process actually looked like:

First I got handed to AI agents who could only see a balance of 13 cents, so they had no idea what I was even reporting. When I finally got through to a human, they gave me incorrect advice and told me to disable billing. I did. That wiped out all the logs of what had happened.

They then asked me to prove my account had been hacked.

So I went to pull the rate limit data to show them and noticed the high-volume requests were still going, by the thousands, in real time, while I was actively talking to support. Their response? "That's what happens when you use our services. Your usage increases."

I asked them why I would be spamming my own API requests and then follow up with support about it just for fun. That's when they finally escalated me.

Five minutes after that escalation, my account was suspended, wiping out whatever evidence and log data I had left.

The tier situation:

On top of all this, my account had been silently bumped up to a higher tier, bypassing a spending cap, with no notification and nothing in their policy to explain it. Google's published docs say you need $1,000 USD in spend to move tiers. Their explanation to me was "long-term customer status." That phrase is not in their policy. And I'd love someone to explain what the point of a $2,000 spending cap is if you're automatically moved past it after spending $1,000.

The week that followed:

I opened Support Case #70245334 and spent days trying to get literally anyone on the phone.

3 different agents. 6 or 7 different escalation managers. 32 Google staff members viewed my profile. One email saying "let me know if you'd like a call" and when I said yes straight away, I was ignored for 18 hours. I gave them my phone number and a clear availability window. Nobody called.

Where things stand now:

Got confirmation today that the $25,672.86 has been waived, and the $9,800 Google had split across 5 increasing payment attempts has been credited back. Still had to cancel my credit card. Multiple bills bounced as a direct result.

But I still don't have answers on any of the stuff that actually matters:

• How a key that doesn't exist in my project generated 60,000 requests

• Whether that key has actually been revoked

• What triggered the tier bump

• Where the traffic came from (they offered IP data but haven't sent anything)

• What error code A85517270361182653 actually is, it's been in the subject line of every single email and no one has explained it

• What the full impact of the declined payments was on my account

Tonight:

After I raised all of this again, Google came back and offered a call. At 2:30 AM AEST my time with a bunch of their product/program managers. Another sign of good faith from their end, cheers for that.

I'm going anyway. I've spent the past week documenting everything, every email, every ignored request, every vague non-answer. I'm going in with a full claims document and I'm not leaving without real answers.

Why I'm posting:

Because this keeps happening to people and it'll keep happening. I want your stories so I can take them into that call tonight and make clear this isn't a one-off.

If you've had unexpected cloud charges, a compromised API key you can't identify, a support experience like this, or a billing dispute that went nowhere, drop it below. I'm reading everything before I get on that call.

I've been documenting this as it happened on LinkedIn if you want the full picture:

• The incident

• The support experience

• How to protect yourself

I got hit by a DoS and a 98k firebase bill a few weeks ago. (post)

Update 5/8 3:00PM PDT: They refunded. Scroll to the bottom for my commentary.

Still -- I would like to see more. I personally can't recommend using GCP or any uncapped cloud provider.

---

I submitted a bughunters report to Google explaining that a single publicly readable object in a multi-regional storage bucket could lead to 1M+ USD in egress charges for a victim, and that an attack could be pulled off by a single $40/mo server in a high throughput data center.

That ticket is sitting in a bucket with P4 (lowest priority) status, and I have not gotten a substantive reply in 15 days (the reasonable timeframe I gave them), so here we go.

Hypothetical situation:

• You’re an agency and want to share a 200MB video with a customer. You’re aware that egress costs 12c a gigabyte.

• Drop the file in a bucket with public reads turned on. You couldn’t decide if you wanted us-east-1 or whatever, so you said “US multi regional”.

• You send a link to your customer.

• The customer loves the video. They post to Reddit.

• It gets 100,000 views from Reddit. 2,000 GB × $0.12/GB = $2400

• This is a bad day, but not gonna kill your company. Your video got a ton of views and your client is happy. 

• The cloud is great! It handled the load perfectly!

Then:

• Then someone nasty decides they don’t like your company or video.

• They rent (or compromise) a cheap bare metal server in a high throughput data center where ingress is free.

• They hit the object as fast as they can with a multithreaded loop.

• Bonus: They amplify the egress by using HTTP2 range attack (unsure if this happened to me in practice).

Real world:

• I had Cloudflare CDN in front, and it was a 200MB .wasm file. See My protections, and why they failed.

• I saw a sustained egress rate of 35GB/s resulting in ~$95K in damages in ~18 hours. 

• My logging is sketchy but it appears to have come from a single machine.

• Billing didn’t catch up in time for me to spring to action. Kill switch behavior was undocumented. The company is gone and there’s no second chance to tighten security.

"If you disable billing for a project, some of your Google Cloud resources might be removed and become non-recoverable. We recommend backing up any data that you have in the project." (source)

Theoretical Maximums:

• Google lists the default egress quota at 200Gbps == 25GB/s. So how could I hit 35GB/s?

• Educated guess: Because it’s 25GB/s per region. I didn’t have enough logging on to see exactly what happened, but a fair theory would be that a multi-regional bucket would lead to quotas beyond 25 Gbps.

• Let’s assume there’s 4 regions and do some scary math:

---

25GB/s * 86400 sec/day * $0.12 per gigabyte = $259,200 per region

$259,200 * 4 regions = $1,036,800 PER DAY.

---

My protections, and why they failed. 

This is all scrambled in the fog of war, but these are educated guesses.

• I did protect against this with a free Cloudflare CDN (WAF is enabled on Cloudflare free).

• The attacker originally found a .wasm (webassembly) file that did not have caching enabled. I don’t know why basic WAF failed me there and allowed repeated requests. Did I need manual rate-limiting too?

• I briefly stopped it “Under Attack Mode” in Cloudflare which neutralized the attack.

• Attacker changed tactics.

A legacy setup

• When I set up the system 7 years ago, a common practice was to name your bucket my-cdn-name.com and stick cloudflare in front of it, with the same domain name. There were no web-workers to provide access to private buckets.

• I suspect that after I neutralized the first attack with “Under Attack Mode”, the bad guy guessed the name of the origin cloud bucket.

Questions

• Is it necessary to have such a high egress quota for new Firebase projects?

• I looked into ReCaptcha in Cloud Armor, etc. These appear to be billed per request, so what’s stopping someone from “Denial of Wallet-ing” with the protections?

• What other attacks or quotas am I missing? 

  • A common occurrence is self-DoS’ing with recursive cloud functions that replicate up to 300 instances each (the insanely high default). Search “bill” in r/firebase or r/googlecloud for more.

There’s no cost protections, billing alerts have latency, attacks are cheap and easy, and default quotas are insanely high. 

One day. One single public object. One million dollars.

[insert dr evil meme]

--Update 5/7--

• I want to be forthcoming and say that I omitted that GCP did offer me a 50% refund about a week ago. I had a series of posts planned and that detail was going to be in the next one.

• The case is in another review (review #4, I think).

• 49k is still a very tough pill to swallow for a small developer who was just trying to build cool shit.

• There is someone that is advocating for me internally now.

• However, I still think this problem goes beyond just a ME thing.

• I'm starting an advocacy project at https://stopuncappedbilling.com There's some good info in there about providers that do offer caps.

--Update 5/8--

• Wrote a post about how to protect yourself in indie hackers subreddit.

• No movement from Google on the bill.

--Update 5/8 3:00PM--

Full refund granted!!!!!!!!! Thank you Reddit for the lively discussion. Thank you GCP for doing the right thing.

I would still like to see more from cloud providers addressing what I perceive to be the root cause here--no simple way to cap billing in the event of emergency.

Because you guys deserve that, and you don't deserve to go through what I did when you just want to make cool shit.

03/19 Update

A small update from our side:

Google has now reopened / continued the review of our case, and they told us that the internal process may take up to 3 weeks.

Thank you again to everyone who shared advice and experiences.

---------------------

We are a small company in Japan.

On March 12, we discovered that our Gemini API appears to have been used without authorization. By the time we noticed it, the charges were already around $44k, so we immediately paused the API and contacted Google. Even after that, the charges kept increasing, and the total eventually reached about $128k.

From our side, this was unauthorized use of our API and completely inconsistent with our normal use. We asked Google for a review / adjustment, but it was denied based on policy.

This is now creating a real risk of bankruptcy and serious debt issues for our company.

I also saw another public case about abnormal Gemini billing, but I could not find the final outcome, so I wanted to ask:

• Has anyone else here gone through something similar?

• Did anyone actually get an adjustment, refund, or credits?

• If Google denied your first request, were you still able to escalate?

All amounts in the screenshots are in Japanese yen (JPY).

We are based in Japan, so this post is written with the help of a translation tool. If the English sounds a little like AI-written text, that is the reason.

Any real experiences or advice would be deeply appreciated....

---------------------

03/17 Update

Thank you very much to everyone for the advice.

We have already started putting some additional measures in place, and we are continuing to gather evidence and communicate with Google.

I would like to add a few points that were not fully explained in my original post.

We were only using Google AI to build a few small internal tools to improve work efficiency. This was not a public-facing product. It was intended for internal company use only.

Because of that, our app was protected with firewall-level IP access restrictions, and all of our GitHub repositories are private. For that reason, we still do not understand how the API key may have been leaked.

The key had actually been used normally for about a month without any issue before this happened.

Based on what we have seen, the abnormal activity appears to have started at around 4:00 AM JST on March 12. We only noticed the issue during a routine check before the end of the workday on March 12. By then, the bill had already risen to more than 7 million JPY.

As soon as we discovered the issue, we took emergency action and contacted Google. However, what shocked us most is that the charges continued to increase even after we took those actions. The billing kept growing until late on March 13, and the final total reached approximately 20.36 million JPY.

Again, thank you to everyone who has shared advice, similar experiences, or possible next steps. It really means a lot.

Getting 503s across the board.

No leaked gemini api key. But with broken access control, hackers used Map API to use my gemini tokens.

Everyone advices to make noise, I am a very silent person. But I am asking the great Reddit community to help me get the attention of the right people.

Can a Google Cloud representative reach me? I can provide my case number privately to a Google Cloud employee.

Thanks in advance.

An executive at Google asked me for a writeup of what happened regarding a DoS that lead to extreme cloud billing charges that were ultimately reversed. They're at least listening.

I redacted a few sensitive bits, and reordered sections for this post.

98k Firebase Bill Abuse Report and Recommendations

This document describes a DoS attack that led to catastrophic cloud egress charges ($98k) for my Firebase project, [REDACTED]. I’ll provide a description of my service, an accounting of the DoS / Denial of Wallet attack that I experienced, and recommendations for GCP to rebuild trust with small to mid-sized developers like myself.

About my Service

The site, hosted at https://simmer.io was built with Firebase and was operating from 2017 until its recent shutdown in April 2025. The project could be described as a “Youtube for Unity WebGL Games”. A developer / auth user would upload their game and it would be accessible to the public web. I had 140,000 users, and about 100,000 games on the website.

Image from Wayback Machine:

[IMAGE]

Impact of this Attack–and Uncapped Cloud Billing

I made revenue by selling “premium hosting”--whitelabel and custom domains, along with Google Ads. My revenue was about $1200/mo and slowly growing, $500-$600 would go to GCP, and another $200 would go to other cloud services and $200 would go to moderators. It was profitable, but running on the margins. Beer money.

Ultimately I went nuclear, destroying customer data as a result of this incident.

Google reversed the charges, but as a result of this attack, I shut down the site and refunded approximately $10,000 to paying users. Most users were paying yearly, and I felt that a full refund was the only acceptable remedy for people that supported my work financially.

Recommendations

These are my personal recommendations for rebuilding trust for small developers like myself.

Billing Caps for Small Developers

Although it’s an industry standard to not offer hard billing caps, I would like to see GCP lead the industry by offering these for small to mid-sized developers.

I’ve seen arguments that large systems (think walmart.com) cannot be halted because of the severe impact of downtime to those large enterprises. I believe that there are heuristics to determine which accounts could be allowed to have hard billing caps, such as:

• Is the account on a basic pay-as-you-go or Firebase plan?

• Does the account lack a TPM, or Committed Use Plan?

Still, some might forget to set caps or alerts at all. I believe failed charges for 10X and 40X beyond typical usage should have stopped my service as non destructively as possible.

Lower Quotas

Basic pay-as-you-go plans should have much stricter quotas across the board, and developers can choose to raise these quotas. Two in particular that worry me are:

• Egress from cloud buckets (200Gbps)

• Cloud Function Instances (300 by default for each function).

I’m sure there are plenty more that could be lowered significantly to prevent abuse. A small firebase developer does not need the same quotas as a large enterprise like Walmart.

Better Documentation for Unlinking Billing

https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/modify-project

“If you disable billing for a project, some of your Google Cloud resources might be removed and become non-recoverable. We recommend backing up any data that you have in the project.”

I would have immediately unlinked billing, had I known that the following services would remain intact:

• Cloud Storage

• Firebase Realtime Database

• Firebase authentication.

My observation was that none of these were destroyed after a billing unlink.

Billing Latency

My observation was that billing alerts can lag significantly behind actual billing numbers. I’m sure there are technical reasons behind this, but to build trust, GCP needs to, in their own written policy, eat the cost of any billing that occurs before a 100% or greater billing alert is sent.

Alternatively, they could offer an insurance plan.

Legal

I did not know I was signing up for unlimited liability when I clicked “enable billing” on my project 7 years ago (TOS, section 12). Liability needs to be limited to some multiple of typical usage. In my case, if I was liable for 5x my normal monthly spend of $500, I perhaps could have paid the bill and continued my operations, bruised, but not destroyed. I could have improved security, and learned an important lesson without complete destruction.

I would even, perhaps attempt to build on GCP again, with liability protection in place.

Technical Support

I chose not to sign up for a technical support plan to help me resolve this issue because of the 3% of cloud billing costs (when I had this extreme overage). Perhaps it could be based on a rolling average of previous months?

Billing Support

I absolutely understand the need for diligence on Google’s side, but I was not able to get this extreme bill to get a second review without contacting friends of mine that worked at Google. I think it’s obvious that this should have gotten an automatic second look after years of $500 service that ballooned to $98K in a single day.

Other concerns

This vulnerability in the wild

[REDACTED, Evidence that this vulnerability is widespread]

I submitted bughunters issue 412128753 that was closed by Google.

Removal of Free Tier Firebase Buckets

To me, it seems likely that Google’s own billing systems cannot stop the extreme financial damage that can be caused by Firebase storage buckets, and that’s why they have a new policy shifting the liability from Google to the developer:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/storage/faqs-storage-changes-announced-sept-2024

I understand that there might be other types of abuse with these buckets, but this policy seems like a soft admission of how dangerous these buckets can be when minor configuration mistakes are made.

Recaptcha / Cloud Armor

These are protections available that could have solved some of the issues that I experienced. But my understanding is that these are billed per attempt, not per human validated use. That means that, even when the developer does everything right and implements these protections, they can be exposed to similar cost overruns that I experienced, with the services that are designed for protection.

Vibe Coding / Firebase Studio

Firebase Studio gives non-developers a chance to write code. I fear that without proper guardrails, occurrences like the one that I experienced will become significantly more commonplace.

Attack Timeline

April 9: I noticed the first abusive behavior on the project. An authenticated user uploaded ~140TB of data to my bucket. No logs to indicate which auth user, but it may have been “[REDACTED]” who caused havoc on another cloud service I was running (Backblaze B2). Regardless, this appears to be a throwaway email account.

The bucket is deleted now, so I don’t have the exact bucket name but I believe it was called [REDACTED].

April 10: I deleted all the rogue data and disabled uploads to the bucket by disabling all writes via Firebase rules. The rogue data was all 100MB files with guid filenames. I can provide a sample file if it is useful.

• This short window led to about $200 in charges. Annoying, but not catastrophic.

• There were no human readable strings in the files from some spot checking with the unix “strings” tool.

• My initial thought was that the user was uploading malicious data to serve to the internet. However I have no evidence of that, nor do I think it happened in practice.

April 12: 8pm (Times are pacific, UTC-7) small spike in egress. Presumably this was the hacker testing their script. I was unaware of this at the time.

April 12-16

[Image: https://github.com/TheRoccoB/simmer-status/blob/master/timeline.png ]

April 12 8:05PM (A): First hacker “test” spike, shown for scale.

April 12 10:00PM (B): Attack begins. ~35GB/s sustained egress. From my cloudflare logs, I believe these came from a single IP [REDACTED] (Hetzner data center), targeting object in bucket [REDACTED]:

gs://[REDACTED]/Build.wasm

This was exposed to the internet via Cloudflare at the URL: [Redacted]/Build.wasm

April 13 3:11PM (C) 175% of your usage billing alert arrives in my inbox (over my budget of $500). I don’t have the exact numbers, but you visually can see that this came in after 75% or more of the overall incident (ballpark estimate: at $50k-$90k of damage).

• Shortly thereafter there were failed charges on my card for $8000, $20000, $20000

• I was on a road trip and was not able to address the issue until 7:00PM, and (incorrectly) made the assumption that after a failed $8000 charge, my account would be suspended.

April 14 8:00PM (D): I stopped the access of simmercdn.com by entering “under attack mode” in Cloudflare, which was sitting in front of my bucket. It broke my site, but I didn’t care.

Sometime between D & E: I used rclone to back up the data in simmercdn.com bucket to Backblaze B2. As you can see, that egress is barely visible on the graph.

April 14 7:25AM-10:15AM (E): Educated Guess: I believe the hacker changed tactics and guessed the public URL of my bucket. Since it was named simmercdn.com, it wasn’t difficult for them to figure it out.

• I stopped the attack by turning off “Fine Grained Access Controls” and making all buckets private in the dashboard.

April 15 3:50AM - 4:40AM (F, G): Frankly I don’t know what caused this spike. At 4:40AM I probably  unlinked billing from my account. I was under extreme sleep deprivation at this point. The only reason I didn’t unlink earlier was that there was a dire warning that I’d perhaps lose data from my account. 

Motivation for the Attack

I was not able to determine a motive for the attack. I did not receive ransoms or threats. I was not aware of any competitor that would like to target my site. I had moderators and did not knowingly host or serve any objectionable material. The policy on the site was “PG-13”, no games with nudity or extreme violence were allowed.

My intuition tells me that this was just someone who wanted to cause chaos. I believe they did it from a $40/month box in a Hetzner data center, based on the IP.

Conclusion

Firebase was a godsend to me when I stood up my project in 2017. I still believe that it is a fantastic product, has a great community, and provides a uniquely great developer experience.

But I absolutely will not consider using it again until better guardrails are in place. And I will continue to advocate for change across all cloud providers.

Thank you for reading. Please email me at [REDACTED] if you have any questions.

---
I'm starting something. stopuncappedbilling.com

I've been running a firebase project for the past ~7 years. My bill slowly crept up to $500/mo over time.

At some point, this week, someone DDoSed / hacked my site, I guess. I was seeing an incredible egress rate of 20 35GB/s for about half a day. I was traveling, and got the alert that I hit "175%" of my budget ($400) around 3, and by the time I got home at 7, I saw the bill went up to almost 100K.

I scrambled to lock all the buckets down, and think I did. I also found some setting to (I think) lock down the egress rate to 100MB/s.

EDIT: That quota setting did not have any effect^.

Bank rejected the first $8000 bill.

Not really sure what to do now. I contacted billing and they rejected the request to waive the charges. I want to open a support ticket but that costs 3% of spend, which in my case is now gonna be a 3,000 support ticket (or more, if I find out I didn't properly secure the buckets).

I'm not sure how anyone can run on these cloud services with any confidence. I (wrongly) figured that things would get locked up after hitting a certain amount of my budget.

I could really use some advice here.

---

Edit April 18:

GCP seems to finally be budging with regard to the bill. They acknowledged the DDoS and are running it through the bureaucracy. I do have some confidence that they'll make this right, but I took destructive actions to stop the charges (deleting buckets). I did have a mostly complete backup of customer data on another cloud, but this has destroyed small business side hustle, where I built a community of over 100,000 users over seven years.

Regarding the 48 step auto kill switch (disable billing with a pub/sub cloud function), my forensics are telling me that there's billing latency, and this would have only stopped charges beyond ~$60,000 graph.

Somebody mentioned DigitalOcean as an alternative. They also have uncapped egress fees if you look closely enough.

---

Edit (previous):

Can google not provide some assurance that you're bill doesn't get over a certain level? Someone below posted a 48 step process for disabling billing.

Can anyone with a firebase account expect to have such an insane bill after upgrading from their free account?

Can they not stop egress or serve 429 errors after a certain point?

I've been a proponent of firebase over the years for ease of use but this is just insane.

---

May 12 Edit: Google refunded after a ton of back and forth. Not gonna go bankrupt, yay!

Hi everyone,

I’m sharing this in case someone has advice or can help, and to warn other beginners about the risks I didn’t understand until it was too late.

In mid-May, I began my self-study journey into data science. I chose to explore the Solana public dataset in BigQuery and started writing simple test SQL queries using Python and the BigQuery API. Just basic practice like looking up transactions by hash or address.

Over two evenings, I ran 17 successful queries and many failed ones (due to syntax and logic errors). After that, I stopped working on the project and continued my learning journey via IBM courses. Ten days later, I received a bill for €50,850 ($58,940).

I had no idea that experimenting with a public dataset could carry significant financial risks. I had studied how billing works and sought general guidance on expected costs, including asking ChatGPT for rough estimates. Based on that, I felt confident that my usage would stay well within reasonable limits (around $30-50 per month or so). However, I now realize I approached billing without sufficient caution and underestimated the potential financial risks, which led to a costly mistake.

I immediately contacted Google Cloud Billing Support. They asked a few questions (what happened, how I plan to avoid this in the future, etc.). A month later, they waived 50% of the bill, which I’m extremely grateful for, but then closed the case and referred me to collections.

However, I was still left with over €25,000 to pay. After that, I submitted a detailed explanation of the incident, along with my tax report and bank statement reflecting that my income is insufficient to cover such a large debt. I asked for further review. Eventually, the case was reopened, and I was granted an additional waiver totalling 90% of the original bill as a one time exception. It was an incredible relief after a 1.5 months of stress.

So now I’m left with roughly €5,000, which is an enormous relief, but also a huge sum for me. Unfortunately, as soon as the second waiver was granted, I received an email from Google Collections stating I had 10 days to pay the full remaining amount, or the debt would be sold to a third party that can lead to an additional fees. I immediately contacted support and explained that I’m fully willing to repay what’s left, but I’ve asked for an installment plan so I can do so without defaulting or being sent to collections.

To be clear:

• I made the mistake

• I’m not trying to escape responsibility

• I’m not a business, and this was purely an educational project

I don’t expect Google to write off any more. But I do hope they’ll let me repay what’s left in a reasonable, human way.

If you’ve gone through something similar, or know someone at Google who might be able to help, I’d really appreciate advice or a point in the right direction.

I also want to warn newcomers about the risks of exploring cloud tools without cost alerts, spending caps, or a solid understanding of billing, this can easily lead to unexpectedly large charges. It’s not something to experiment with lightly, as the consequences can be serious.

Thanks for reading. Not looking for pity, just support, ideas, or connections that might help resolve this last step fairly.

UPDATE - July 21, 2025

Over the past 4 days, I've been trying to find a way to reach the Google Collections department to discuss possible options, but it seems there is no available contact. I also asked billing support if they could provide contacts for the collections department or offer advice or help from other teams, like Google Developer Advocacy. Unfortunately, they weren't able to offer further help and the case is marked as cloed. I also reached out to several people from Google Developer Advocacy on Twitter but received no response.

I would be very grateful if someone could help me get in touch with anyone outside the billing team who might be able to assist.

The post has received unexpected attention with over 230,000 views so it seems the issue resonates with many who may be facing similar challenges.

UPDATE - July 31, 2025

The issue has been fully resolved, full waiver granted!

A Product Manager from the BigQuery team reached out to me and helped get the case re-evaluated. After an internal review, they decided to waive the full amount. While I understand this level of laniecy isn't typical, in this one-off situation, and despite the mistake being fully on my side, they granted a full waiver, which I deeply appreciate.

Thanks again to everyone who offered support or shared advice, it truly helped. And huge thanks to the Google team for paying attention to users' issues.

I’m excited to share that as of today, I officially hold 14 active Google Cloud certifications—from Foundational up through Professional level (Credly):

• Professional Cloud Architect (11/12/24)

• Professional Cloud Data Engineer (10/14/24)

• Professional Cloud DevOps Engineer (02/10/25)

• Professional Cloud Database Engineer (02/16/25)

• Professional Cloud Developer (02/06/25)

• Professional Cloud Network Engineer (01/23/25)

• Professional Cloud Security Engineer (12/31/24)

• Professional Machine Learning Engineer (09/07/24)

• Professional Google Workspace Administrator (12/21/24)

• Associate Cloud Engineer (11/05/24)

• Associate Data Practitioner (11/26/24)

• Associate Google Workspace Administrator (02/16/25)

• Cloud Digital Leader (09/02/24)

• Generative AI Leader (05/15/25)

Practical Tip: Test Center vs. At-Home Proctoring

Where you take your exam matters. While both options result in the same certificate, the experience can be vastly different.

My Strong Preference: The Test Center
I almost exclusively choose to test at a physical center. The one I frequent offers a perfect, stress-free environment: a private exam room, unlimited coffee and tea, and the flexibility to arrive early and settle in. You show up, and everything just works.

The Risks of Remote Proctoring
Testing from home introduces variables and potential points of failure:

• Strict Environment: You need a pristine, empty room. Any clutter can lead to a long back-and-forth with the proctor. Even if you've passed in the same room before, a different proctor might see things differently.

• Interruptions = Failure: If another person enters your room or a voice is heard on the microphone, the exam can be terminated immediately with no refund.

• Proctor Delays: I've experienced waiting over an hour past my start time, staring at a locked screen, just waiting for a proctor to become available.

• Technical Glitches: Some exams, like the Cloud Security Engineer and Cloud Network Engineer, have very strict monitoring. A glance away from the screen can trigger a warning or failure.

While my remote exams have been successful about 90% of the time, that 10% chance of a major headache is why I only book at home when a test center is completely unavailable.

Speaking of difficulty, I found the Professional Cloud Network Engineer exam to be the most challenging of all. Be prepared for incredibly long, dense questions that can take up to ten minutes just to read and comprehend.

The Fun Part: The Swag!

One of the best perks of getting certified is the swag. For each Professional certification you pass, Google sends you a code to redeem a free item from their exclusive store. It’s a fantastic way to celebrate the achievement. Over my journey, I've collected a few different items! (Photos in the image gallery)

P.S. Unfortunately, the certification merchandise benefit program was discontinued on March 15, 2025.

Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn!

Recap: An attack on cloud buckets left me with a 98k firebase bill, a dead company and a trip to the ER. It was called simmer.io, a Youtube for WebGL games with 140,000 users, some paid. I refunded 10k in user subscriptions, and I'm back to MRR: $0. G reversed the charges yesterday. (technical details).

For me personally, I won't consider returning to this platform until they offer true spend caps. It's a shame because Firebase is a very smooth developer experience and solved a lot of problems for me.

This is a post about GCP billing support.

The reason for this post is that I don't want to give the impression that they'll just fix your awful day without a LOT of diligence. In fairness, this was resolved in under 30 days, which is commendable for such a large organization (I worked at Meta for a few years, and can tell you that big tech companies are SLOOOOOW).

I'll start with some advice if you find yourself in a similar situation:

Be polite and persistent. Your support person may be the only advocate you have. If you're a dick, will they want to help you?

So here we go...

Billing support chat:

Me: OMG Everything is on fire, how do I shut it down?!!!

G Support: Unlink the billing account.

Me: I click unlink and it says account resources may become unrecoverable! What happens when I click the button?

G Support: You will have to reach out to technical support.

Technical support is not free. Basic support is defined as $29 or 3% of monthly spend, whichever is higher. I believe this is fair under normal circumstances. But when your dashboard is showing $66,000 in charges, you start to do some nasty mental math.

And, waiting four hours for tech support is not an option when your bill is growing by roughly $10,000 an hour.

I eventually gave up trying to save the business and unlinked billing on my main project and a few other side projects. I went full nuclear and deleted all infrastructure.

Then I started an email thread. I was honest and polite through the whole thing. In full transparency, I lost my cool a bit in some of the earlier chats. Not abusive, but impolite, given the panic of the situation.

I’m going to compress 3.5 weeks worth of interactions into a few paragraphs.

Email thread

Me: This was abuse, I was DoS’ed. I stopped it as fast as I could.

G Support: OK. 

Me: I’m willing to discuss partial payment. Anything you can do for a customer that’s been with you for 7 years, paying $500/mo, and who lost their business?

G Support: No.

Me: Ok will you escalate?

G Support: Ok.

Me: Any updates?

G Support: Form letter. This is one of the many risks of cloud. You are responsible for the bill.

Me: I was attacked, billing alerts came in after 50k in damage, I shut it off fast. Will you escalate?

… silence …

I called a software engineer friend at G. “Please beg them to take another look at case [#XXXXXX]”.

G Support: This is [Jim] I’m a support manager and I will be taking over this case. Please wait while we have a technical team review.

Me: Ok.

Me: IP address [x.x.x.x] sent [XXX] Million requests observed through my Cloudflare dashboard. I don’t have logs for direct bucket reads. I have also filed a Bughunters report that demonstrates how [storage object configuration] can lead to 1M in egress charges over the course of a day in an abusive scenario.

G Support: The technical team reviewed and confirmed a denial of service. I have requested a one-time goodwill credit. Please wait.

Me: Ok

Me: Are you there?

G Support: Good news, we’re crediting your bill for 49K (no mention of where the number came from, or any technical details of the attack. I’m assuming it was just a straight 50%)

Me: You are the world's greatest support person. Billing alerts were delayed. This is still a life altering bill. Can you do more?

…silence…

Me: Are you there?

Me: Are you there? 

Me: I hint that I want to tell the story publicly.

Me: Are you there? I lost my business. Isn't that enough? I provide more technical details.

I contact more friends at G, asking them to request support does another appeal.

G Support: I sincerely empathize with your situation. We'll do another review.

This was likely overseas support. They list Philippine Standard Time on the bottom of the email, but I notice that they CC'ed a sales manager closer to home base. I email them.

Me, to Sales Mgr: Here's a summary of the situation. Can you advocate for my case? Are you willing to do a call?

Sales Mgr: Support will contact you.

I notice a meeting link at the bottom of their email that allows you to schedule a meeting. I schedule a meeting.

Me, to Sales Mgr: I scheduled a meeting with you to quickly discuss the issue.

Sales Mgr: I cancelled the meeting. This is outside my jurisdiction. Support will help you.

This was an inflection point for me. I replied back with a one-liner: "Bummer". And then I made the big post to reddit about what happened, and how it could happen to most anyone.

Someone on reddit reached out to me with an executive's email address. I emailed the exec, and did not get a response.

I continued to go on my post storm, with reddit posts reaching about 1M views across a few different communities.

G Support: We have reversed the charges. Have a nice day.

Me: Thanks. You need to create spending limits so this doesn't happen to others. I'm going to continue to advocate for change.

This. Was. An. Ordeal.

The human cost: I ended up in the ER at one point with intense abdominal pain due to the stress of the situation (coffee + no food for days is not good for your stomach). I think about those that are less connected than me, and who don't have the fortitude to tell all publicly.

What happens to them?

I'm starting an advocacy group here https://stopuncappedbilling.com It has some good info on what providers offer spending limits. It might be a blog or something in the future.

I got this email last night saying that Google will now honour api billing limits for Gemini.

Google Cloud urgently needs a prepaid option or a hard, unchangeable spending cap with a self-imposed cooldown period (e.g. 2 weeks). Right now, a hacked account can instantly raise limits and rack up hundreds of thousands in charges before you even get the alert. That’s insane. Let users set a high-but-safe ceiling (say €3,000) that can’t be changed instantly. If I normally spend €50/day, there’s no reason my account should be vulnerable to a sudden €400,000 bill. This is a basic security feature, and the current setup is reckless.

I run a live app: ~$1M ARR, 100,000 users, over a million customer photos. As of 48+ hours ago it's all frozen — and Google did it.

What happened: Google Maps requires you to ship an API key inside your mobile app. Google's own docs say these keys aren't secrets — that's the intended design, so that's what I did. What they don't warn you: the moment the Gemini API is enabled anywhere in that same project, that same Maps key can suddenly authenticate to Gemini. No warning, no confirmation, no email. A key meant to draw a map can now run paid AI.

Someone pulled my key out of my app — exactly where Google requires it to live — and ran thousands of dollars of Gemini calls I never made. I have never used Gemini. I thought I had a spending cap; Google had silently auto-raised my tier, so it stopped nothing.

Then Google suspended my entire project for "abusive activity consistent with hijacking." Read that again: a third party exploited a gap in Google's own design, ran up charges on me, and Google's response was to lock ME out and treat me as the abuser.

The damage isn't just the money. Everything lived in that one project — my app, my keys, and all 100,000 users' photos, over a million images. One suspension froze the entire company. My users can't load their photos. I can't even reach the console to fix anything. 48+ hours of a form-letter appeal queue while my business sits dead.

To be clear: nothing was stolen — that API key can't even reach storage. But it didn't matter, because Google froze access to all of it in one move anyway.

The lesson, for anyone building something real:

One suspension on Google Cloud freezes your ENTIRE project at once — app, keys, and your stored user data — and locks you out completely. Do NOT keep your critical user data in the same blast radius that a billing or abuse flag can freeze out from under you.

I trusted Google Cloud to hold my customers' photos, and a flaw I didn't create took my whole company offline. Move your storage to AWS/S3!

If anyone from Google sees this — I have my appeal and support case numbers ready. Please.

Hi everyone,

I’m a 24-year-old solo developer running a small educational app. My infrastructure is heavily dependent on Firebase.

I’m facing a life-altering, $15,400 Google Cloud bill for a service I did not use, and after 6 days, support is giving me the runaround. I’ve realized I fell into a structural security trap set by Google’s own legacy architecture, exacerbated by a dangerous flaw in their Gemini API implementation.

I want to expose this not only to get help but to warn every developer using legacy Firebase or GCP projects.

The Problem: Legacy Keys + Gemini = Disaster

My project has existed for several years. Like many of you, it had auto-generated API keys (e.g., from Firebase setup or a Maps API key). Years ago, the default state for these keys was "unrestricted." We were taught these were "public keys" (to be embedded in browser/Android clients) and that their security model relied on HTTP Referrer or Package Name restrictions.

The exploit happened the moment I enabled the Gemini API on that project for internal testing on AI Studio (No warnings at all about the legacy firebase keys). I did not create a new key. I did not realize that enabling Gemini made my unrestricted legacy "public" key suddenly valid for expensive, server-side AI inference. An attacker found this old key (which I thought was safe because it was only used for non-billable public APIs) and used it to spam Gemini inference from a botnet.

This is exactly the vulnerability explained in detail by Truffle Security in this report:https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/google-api-keys-werent-secrets-but-then-gemini-changed-the-rules

As the report argues, Google merged the concept of "public keys" with "server-side secrets" (Gemini). By allowing legacy unrestricted keys to work with an expensive AI API, they created an "insecure-by-default" architecture. Enabling the Gemini API should have forced a key restriction or a new key.

Due Diligence Was Powerless Against Google’s 30-Hour Lag

I thought I had protected myself. I have budget alerts set. My first alert was at $40.

Here is my timeline:

1. At $40 (Alert received via email): I logged in within 10 minutes of receiving the alert.

2. Instant Action: I found the fraudulent activity and revoked all my key immediately and Disabled Gemini API on GCP. I thought I had caught it early.

I was wrong. The next day, when the billing dashboard updated, the $40 had turned into $15,400.

Google Cloud’s billing console has a massive delay—around 30 hours between actual usage and it appearing in the console. Budget alerts are practically useless for high-volume, automated API abuse. Even acting within minutes of the alert, the debt had already piled up during that reporting lag.

The Devastating Position

I am a solo dev with a small business. I cannot afford to lose $15,400 for a structural flaw in Google’s platform.

• Case #68861410 has been open for 6 days. Every time I ask for an update on the human review, I get a canned response saying it's still with the review team.

• The Automated Charge on April 1st: They will attempt to charge my card on the 1st of the month.

• Impending Shutdown: When the payment fails, my account will be suspended. My startup’s app will go down. Because I rely on Firebase (Firestore, Authentication, etc.), migrating is impossible in this timeframe.

I am terrified that this flaw in Google's design will destroy my livelihood and my years of hard work.

Has this happened to anyone else? If anyone from the Google Cloud or Firebase teams sees this, please, I beg you to have a human review my case and freeze this bill before you shut down my business. This cannot be my fault.

I’ve been a full-stack dev for 30+ years. I’ve used pretty much every platform out there, including Google Cloud, which I trusted — until this.

I was integrating with Gemini API (via A2A protocol) on what I believed was the free preview tier. I monitored the billing console religiously. It showed $0.56 in charges for four full days. I thought I was good.

Then, within less than 30 minutes, charges exploded like this:

• At 3:42 AM — $0.56

• At 4:03 AM — $203.60

• At 4:13 AM — $343.15By the end of the session: over $800 withdrawn from my account.And just like that? Project suspended.

Support admits the charges all came from a single day — April 4th — and that the billing console wasn’t reflecting real-time usage. I was flying blind while the meter ran wild.

I followed every rule:

• Budget alerts set ✅

• Free preview version used ✅

• Usage monitored via console ✅

And still got sucker-punched.

This has absolutely wrecked my project. I was building this system to help pull myself out of a financial hole after a brutal year. I’m solo. I’m not some VC-backed company. I trusted Google’s platform, and it feels like I got played.

If you’re using Gemini APIs, watch your billing like a hawk. And don’t trust that console — it lagged behind while the charges piled up.

Full transcript + screenshots + billing console madness:

https://x.com/mkearl1/status/1911829305975558506

Google, if you see this, I’m not asking for favors — I’m asking for transparency, accountability, and a fair resolution.

On July 17, my u/Google Cloud account was hit by massive unauthorized u/Gemini API usage.

The unauthorized usage was a result of Google’s architecture of the Gemini API. Google sent no alerts and no warnings appeared in the Google Cloud Console indicating that old, public-facing keys had retroactively gained generative AI capabilities.

I had configured monthly budget alerts. At 6:14pm I received a budget alert for $550. Within minutes of seeing it, I investigated and shut down Gemini API access across all projects. Usage stopped immediately.

But by then, costs of approx. $87K (sorry for mentioning $82k in title, it was actually more) had already accumulated. This had all taken place in the 5 hours before the alert.

Google's own anomaly detection also failed to protect me. Almost an hour AFTER I had already shut Gemini down, Google sent me a “Cost Anomaly” alert reporting actual total costs of $4.7K, nowhere near the actual eventual bill.

After my objection and a technical investigation, Google has now approved a partial credit of $55K.

So for an approximately $87K unauthorized bill, Google is offering approximately $55K in credit, leaving me with roughly $32K to pay. For something I did not use.

Note that Google announced new hard spending caps and improved anomaly detection on the 28th of July.. So this exact type of unauthorized usage may not be possible anymore, but with hackers increasingly equipped with AI tools, there is a good chance other vulnerabilities will be found.

I am developing software for the blind, in particular the app u/PiccyBot, which has won awards in the blind community. It is a niche development field though, and these kind of costs are crippling to me. Knowing that Google definitely doesn’t have our back even when the way the Gemini API has been set up is the main issue, it is time for me to look for better providers.

I’ve got 20 years of IT experience, and I still ended up with over $34,000 CAD in BigQuery charges in less than a day.

• Marketplace pages push you to “try the sample queries” with no warnings.

• Clicking the links takes you straight into BigQuery—no alerts, no prompts.

• My promotional credits barely made a dent.

• I’ve opened a billing support case and am still waiting for a response.

Even experts can get burned. Under Canada’s Competition Act, misleading or unclear representations are generally prohibited—this experience felt exactly like that.

Update on 2025-09-01:
Thanks for mullemeckarenfet's comment: Another victim of the Solana dataset. This user got their full bill waived a month ago ($58k): https://www.reddit.com/r/googlecloud/s/RVkdUmfkB5. I referred to this case, but Google billing support they updated their policy for not refunding for such cases any more. The case was handed over to another escalation manager. I replied and asked them about regulation concern and requested to escalate to North America team since that team may have better understandings about regulations. Waiting for their reply.

Update on 2025-09-02:
The billing support didn't escalate to North America. They admitted they didn't show cost alert on the website. They still refused to provide any waiver or credit, but only to close the ticket. I'll try again.

Update on 2025-09-03:
This morning got update from the billing support that the case will be escalated after I expressed the financial burden by this surprising bill. Then I sent a quick email to thank the previous escalation manager and said that I didn't ment to use it for free, even set up a billing alert but didn't realize this kinda bill will hit me.

Update on 2025-09-11:
After a few rounds of chats, the ticket is in progress and pending on Google Cloud for 5 biz days. I hope they will give me a break as the other same case.

Update on 2025-09-16:
The ticket is in progress and pending on Google Cloud. Asked google support in a chat, and more teams got involved and will keep me updated at the earliest.

Update on 2025-09-23:
Google Support replied and suggested to reach out my account representative (Field Sales Representative) but I don't know any, so I just followed up to know more about it.

Update on 2025-10-03:
After 8 days, FSR got back to me, and ask for the contexts of the ticket. Google Support said FSR doesn't have any knowledge about the case, so Support also briefed.