[creativesage]

Thanks to everyone with constructive feedback.

A few things that stood out to me:

One alert is never enough. Treating alerting as a system, not a single email.

GCP pricing calculator in the deployment checklist, not an afterthought. You almost have to be obsessive about checking.

Hard caps: GCP doesn't have them. Budgets only send alerts, they don't stop charges. You can wire automation to disable billing but that's a hack, not a feature.

Cloud providers benefit financially from complexity and opaque defaults. I own my config mistakes, but the suggestions around capacity planning and realistic cost modeling were genuinely helpful.

[tra3]

Sorry to hear this happened to you. Everyone's piling on, like they've never made mistakes. With no "hard" limits, it's almost like google wants this to happen. Have you tried contacting your credit card company? They may be able to chargeback google. Maybe you can make a case about idle capacity?

I have enabled some google services to play with (maps, calendars), that required me to put my credit card down. I'm thinking I should get a prepaid credit card so if things get out of hand, they'll shut me down rather than keep charging me until my max credit limit.