I registered few months ago on the google cloud platform for the "12 months 300$ trial" to test the possibilities of the cloud.
On top of gcp there was always a banner saying how many days and how many $ left for trial period.
When the first billing with 0$ came in, I got a lot of trouble with our accountant because the bill wasn't set on our company but personal/private.
After a lot of problems adding a new payment method for a new billing account (also with Google Billing Support) - Long story short: I had to delete the private billing account and added a new company billing account.
Now I do not have that free trial banner with information anymore.
Rereading the conditions I'd say there should be no problem:
1.1 The Free Trial applies only to the use of the Services.
1.2 Only new Google Cloud Platform customers are eligible to participate in the Free Trial.
1.3 The Free Trial starts when Customer creates a billing account in the Google Cloud Console (“Free Trial Start Date”) and ends on the earlier of (i) the date that Customer’s fees for usage exceeds $300 or (ii) 12 months from the Free Trial Start Date.
So:
How can I verify if I am still in the trial phase?
If I got kicked out, what can I do to continue the trial phase?
Is there anything else I'm probably missing?
Thank you for your time!
Sidenote (or better said my opinion):
Until now I didn't try more than the AppEngine.
With all the problems that I had with the payment method verification and the support (took 1 1/2 months), now loosing the free trial phase, I must say that I did not enjoy this whole bureaucracy in any way and am almost done with the "cloud hype", feeling to me like a "big giant buzzword bureaucracy monster" :'(.
Related
Today I received a notification: "There are still seven days until your trial expires. Upgrade your account now to enable automatic billing and prevent loss of service when your trial expires. Upgrade now!".
The FAQ says: "You can estimate the cost of using Google Cloud by translating your estimate of the resources you'll use into estimated monthly charges with the pricing calculator, or by consulting the pricing page."
The pricing calculator has many new specific terms. I’m not sure that I understand all of them correctly.
How to estimate how much I will pay for the account after the upgrade? I would be very grateful for a simple explanation or step-by-step instructions for a correct estimate.
As far as I can tell, you should have $300 in credits during your trial. All spendings should be visible in billing, except the bill will be 0 because the credit was applied.
Go to your project at https://console.cloud.google.com/
Select "Billing" either from the dashboard or from the side nav
View your report for detailed spending on all services you use
This should continue to reflect your spending in the future if you wish to stay with your current infrastructure. Otherwise, you can always use the calculator and match the services you are using.
Documentation on View Your Billing Reports and Cost Trends might be helpful for you. It includes a step by step guide for reading and understanding billing charts,changing chart settings, chart style, data order, preset views, viewing your forecasted cost, viewing your credits etc.
I used Google Cloud for 1 year and after that I stopped using it for almost a year.
Now I want to use it again, but the resources (VM'S, Snapshots, etc) are removed by Google. Accordering to Google, all resources will be removed after the trial periode has been exceeded by 30 day's.
Is is possible to file a restore request (whole project, or at least a VM or Snapshot? Paid, or unpaid restore doesn't matter for me.
Please advice.
Thank you.
upgraded my account to a paid account (pay as you go). But still no resources.
Only my project name is visible.
The GCP Free Tier documentation is very clear in this aspect, as it states in the "Recovering data" section:
Recovering Data
Contact Google Billing Support to export any data you stored in GCP services (other than on Compute Engine) during your trial period. Your data and resources are only available for 30 days after the free trial ends.
Maybe a couple days after the 30 days you would still have a chance to request it and have it done, but more than that is very unlikely. This kind of deadlines are in place to protect and free some of the shared resources of GCP.
Your only realistic possibility here is contacting GCP support, explain your situation and hope that something could be recovered, but understand that it's very unlikely.
I just signed up for Google Cloud Platform's free trial, and the clicked to upgrade my billing account because it said I needed that to be eligible for the "Always Free" program.
However, what I am not sure about is if that took away the $300 credit that I received from the free trial (I literally just signed up, so the time didn't expire or anything).
Do I still have that $300 credit? If not, is there a way to get it back?
Earlier answer is outdated. As of August 17, 2020 new terms state that "users now have 90 days to use their $300 USD in Google Cloud credits." After 90 days any unused credits will expire.
For full details please see Supplemental Terms and Conditions For Google Cloud Platform Free Trial.
UPDATE: Google terms have been updated and now the credits expire after 90 days, the right answer now is https://stackoverflow.com/a/65745613/797708
You should have the credit, it's explained on the free-tier documentation
When you upgrade:
Any remaining, unexpired free trial credit remains in your account.
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier#how-to-upgrade
I started a free trial account on GCP with card authorization. I got my 300$ of resources. I want to use more than 8 cores though, so from what I understand I have to upgrade to a normal account. The thing I don't know is
Will credits gained from free trial be still available on my account after switching to the normal account? Or will I lose all the money given by Google?
Earlier answers are now outdated. As of August 17, 2020 new terms state that "users now have 90 days to use their $300 USD in Google Cloud credits." After 90 days any unused credits will expire.
Also note: "If Customer upgrades to the standard Google Cloud Platform account before the Free Trial ends, any unused credit will continue to apply and will expire 3 months after the Free Trial Start Date if it remains unused." Therefore the period is now reduced to 3 months instead of 12, but you will still have any free credits remaining for that period.
For full details please see Supplemental Terms and Conditions For Google Cloud Platform Free Trial which can be found at https://cloud.google.com/terms/free-trial
As per the FAQ:
If you upgrade to a paid account before the 12-month trial period ends, any remaining amount of your initial $300 credit remains in your account.
I created two virtual machine instances. After the trial they disappear. I already search in the compute engine menu but i can't find anything. Do you know if i can recover them or what can i do?.
After your trial ends, the resources you created during the trial are stopped, but can be restored if you upgrade to a paid account within 30 days.
Within that 30-day period, you can also contact Google Billing Support to export any data you stored in Google GCP services (other than on Compute Engine). After 30 days, your data and resources are not available, even if you upgrade.
You can find more detail at this link.
Update: 2020-12-18
I just have had a chat with google billing support. They confirm that they remove data after 30 days as state here https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier#end (They gave me this link )
After the VMs are removed , they will gone forever. You cannot do anything about it.
And they also said that they DO NOT give any email warning that the service is ending and the VMs will be removed.
Very surprised about this and this is like a problem for at least 2 years. And they do nothing about it. It is just one email and very very important one!
They also said "we will send a feedback to our engineering team regarding this incident" Hope that their engineering team will create this email next time.
However, if you have a paid account, it will be different. You will get a warning email ( just one , as I understand) and you will have 7 + 30 days before your vm will be deleted. This is from the chat:
If the account missed a payment, the billing account will go to "Delinquent Status" and after 7 days, the account will be suspended and the service will be interrupted. Which means, the VM's will stop to function.
Once the account is in a delinquent status, the moment it was entered delinquency, you'll receive a notice via email that you need to update the form of payment to remove the delinquency, if not, the account will be suspended.
Once it's suspended, the project will start to go to the period when the project needs to be link to an active account within 30 days, otherwise, the data and resources are gradually deleted from the project if not linked to a working billing account in a span of 30 days.
After the 30 day recovery period, all resources on the project are fully deleted and there are no more means of recovering them, that's what will happen and the stages will experience "if" the account missed a payment or when the card link in the account expires.
As I understand , it will be one email only.