You have to give them a credit card in order to use the free tier, and they refuse to implement any features that would let you add safeguards (beyond setting an alert so you can find out after you've already spent the money).
Edit: I apologize; they did in fact add something beyond alerts: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... ...which is less them implementing a feature and more telling you how to badly implement it yourself. I don't believe this changes the gist of my comment, but it is worth pointing out in the interest of precision.
Edit 2: Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447499 , GCP actually does have a way to cap some resources. It still strikes me as the most "how can we technically claim to be supporting that feature request while still making it as easy as possible to spend more money than you intended to" but there it is.
There are countless companies who specialise in managing cloud costs because of how difficult it is to know when and for what you are going to be charged. Especially for things like data transfer.
And by default they don't have a daily spending limit so it's very easy to see a major cost over-run at the beginning.
Edit: I apologize; they did in fact add something beyond alerts: https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/notify#cap_disa... ...which is less them implementing a feature and more telling you how to badly implement it yourself. I don't believe this changes the gist of my comment, but it is worth pointing out in the interest of precision.
Edit 2: Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447499 , GCP actually does have a way to cap some resources. It still strikes me as the most "how can we technically claim to be supporting that feature request while still making it as easy as possible to spend more money than you intended to" but there it is.