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.
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I configured two hourly performance AWS workspaces about 2 months ago. The fee for each is 9.75/mo + .47/hour.
I used each maybe only 3 hours each so I would expect a bill of about $22.32 ((9.75 x 2) + (.47 x 6))but my bill was over $70 (which equals about 100 hours). I reached out to support and this is what they concluded:
As per checking with the Service Team, they have advised that WorkSpaces are billed on a monthly basis, and you pay only for the WorkSpaces you launch that allow end-users to access the documents, applications and resources they need with the device of their choice, including laptops, iPad, Kindle Fire, or Android tablets. So even if the service is on a stop mode, as long as users keep on accessing to the documents, desktops or even domains you have the WorkSpace associated to, will incur in charges.
I am the only user and I didn't interact with the stopped workspaces. I don't have any other AWS services interacting with these workspaces. I don't even understand how users could access "documents, desktops or even domains you have the WorkSpace associated to" if the workspace is stopped.
I have trouble drilling down to the necessary level of detail using the AWS billing dashboard - so I just feel like I have a blindspot here. Why am I getting billed so much? How can I get more details about these Workspace charges?
AWS Support actually called me. They were a big help in demystifying the charges. The short answer is that I'm a dummy. But I wanted to provide an explanation, info and links for others who want to get more details about their own usage and bill.
AWS has a few other helpful ways to get more info. The first was the bill itself (From your billing home page click on 'Bills' in the top left). The first thing I learned was that (1) my bill was $50 not $70. I might have combined my Jan and Feb bill or thought their 'estimate' was the bill. Either way - my baseline was wrong. (2) I also had an RDS instance running which accounted for $16. (3) Finally I could see an exact breakdown of workspace charges. There was the base monthly charge of 9.75. Then there was the .47 hourly charge for 22 hours which accounted for 10.34. The charges we're adding up - but the hours seemed too high.
This was great but I asked if there was a way to see when I used those 22 hours because that was still more than I had recorded myself. He directed me to the cost explorer. On the cost explorer specifically there was a histogram with a button on the top right to "View in Cost Explorer".
There I was able to view how much I was billed per day. Using the group by options on the top we grouped by 'Service' to see this
This showed that nearly all of those hours were on one day. I think that's when I set things up and might not have had AutoStop toggled. So just make sure you have your workspace configured for AutoStop if that's best for you.
I am new to Google cloud and I am using free credits from google for signup.
But till today not even 1 credit is consumed , I have used Cloud Domains service to buy one domain that costed 860 INR and deployed a VM that said more than 6000 per month , there is no sign of any payment activity in billing center it always says 0 . I am worried because if my card is being used for payments.
thanks in advance
By default "promotions" are not displayed when you look at GCP Console - Billing - Reports, which is what you are seeing by default when you click in "Billing". That is why you are seeing $0 as the total cost for the report.
On the right side of the "Billings - Report", in the filters, you will find the option to deselect "Promotions and others". After deselecting such an option you will see the detailed cost of the services you are using for your GCP account.
To see how many credits you still own, you have to go to "Billings - Overview" and click on "Credit details" card.
Obviously buying a domain is not included in the free tier or with the credits, how are you going to return the domain name after the 90-day trial expires?.
For the rest of the services, you will find what is included in the free tier here, and in the "Credit details" section you will find where that credits can be used.
I registered few months ago on the google cloud platform for the "12 months 300$ 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" :'(.
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 am working on standing up a mobile app with Google Datastore as backend database. I am debating whether google datastore is right choice for below use cases vs other datastorage options google offers. We are a small team and we don't want to incur lot of operations costs in the initial run. Application will have the following use cases:
User registration and profile which will take user personal identification details like credit cards, bank account , emails,address etc
Various subscription plans like yearly subscription price, monthly subscription price and pay per single service . User will be charged with bank account or credit card set on user profile
Mobile app will be launched within next 2 months and i am expecting at-least 1000 users in first few months
Appreciate your feedback at this stage where we are laying down the foundation of the app
Thank you
Datastore is good to manage user profiles and the use cases that you're referring as well it has free quota amounts and low costs regarding its usage and it'll be a better option compared with Cloud SQL which price and storage capacity is limited to the machine type that you're using. Additionally, as this isn't a technical inquiry, but a solution concern, I suggest posting this on the Datastore Google Groups where ideas regarding the Datastore and other products would be properly exchanged.