How do I set a cost limit in Google Developers Console

Question

Some functions in the Google Developers Console, like the Analytics API, are free until you reach a quota. Other functions, like Google Cloud Storage, create costs from the first click.

When I upload a file under https://console.developers.google.com/ > Storage > Cloud Storage > Storage Browser and I make this file publicly available, I pay about $0.12 per GB traffic.

But theoretically the traffic to this link could explode, e.g. because of sudden popularity. Therefore I would like to set something like a daily or monthly cost limit.

Q: How do I protect myself from overly high costs in the Google Developers Console?

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27616776/how-do-i-set-a-cost-limit-in-google-developers-console

Answer 1

You cannot. I asked Google about this, here's their response, from May 7 2016:

(GCE = Google cloud engine. No spending limits.
GAE = Google app engine — yes it has spending limits.)

... you are eligible for support on ... only ...
... [various helpful links] ...

That been said, at the moment there is no a feature that allows you to configure a limited budget on GCE. This feature is certainly available for GAE [1]. As you mentioned in your comments, you either can totally shut down your VMs (will depend on your use case) or set the VMs to send you alerts if they reach a certain traffic limit [2].

Sincerely,

Someone's first name
Technical Solutions Representative
Google Cloud Platform

[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas
[2] https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/support/notification-options

@wmdry, you wrote: "traffic to this link could explode" — I'm afraid of this too. That's why I asked Google about this. And I'm planning to avoid Google's CDN because of this, and use another CDN provider instead, which has spending limits. Because, unlike Nginx, I don't see any way for me to rate limit / throttle Google's CDN.

I do plan to use GCE (Google Cloud Engine) though. Therefore, right now I'm reading about how to rate limit my Nginx server. Because if I just configure Nginx correctly, then those $0.12 / GB you mentioned, cannot possible explode to ... like $10k in a month? What if Google sends a $10k bill when I'm back from an a few week's vacation, just because of my hobby project and a few people downloading a 1 MB movie over and over again forever (because: evil). Hmm, & the bigger & faster my servers, the higher the risk.

I hope Google will add spending limits, because I did want to use Google's CDN.

Update 2020: Apparently this does bite people from time to time — look here:
"Burnt $72k testing Firebase and Cloud Run and almost went bankrupt", Dec 08, 2020, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25372336, In that case, they could contact Google and in the end didn't need to pay.