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by MattGaiser 845 days ago
> Last week I ran a script on BigQuery for historical HTTP Archive data and was billed $14,000 by Google Cloud with zero warning whatsoever,

This comment kind of suggests that you do not understand how BigQuery bills. The archive pays for the storage, but you have to pay for the queries. You would also have had to attach a billing account to run those queries. Running BigQuery searches is not free.

Expensive lesson, but on the surface this one appears to be your error.
2 comments
madsbuch 845 days ago
It seems excessive to allow USD 14k spend on a newly created account, or and account with no prior big spend. If I was Google, I would not allow it without explicitly raising limits or increasing quotas. Otherwise there is a big chance there customer can not pay and they just lost that resource – unless you don't really have an expense for that resource and you use predatory pricing.
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rvnx 845 days ago
It's like predatory telcos who charge you "roaming data fees: $4,500, but took bad you didn't check your online bill before"

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2009/04/users-62000-data-bil...

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httparchive 845 days ago
Yes and no, I ran the script before and the fee wasn't that high (they jacked it up last summer). Usually I have to jump through a ton of hoops just to add more CPU cores to my VMs so I "trusted" that GCP would warn me if I ever made an error.

One of the bigger issues is they charged my card before I literally had any notice what the bill was - it wasn't even in the dashboard yet. I would have terminated the script ASAP had I gotten *any* warning.

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