After Free Trial Charges

VPN
1

Greetings,

I’ve used Google Cloud for a course project, at their home page, it is written "

$300 in free credits for new customers

New customers get $300 in free credits to fully explore and conduct an assessment of Google Cloud. You won’t be charged until you upgrade."

So I assumed it is safe to put my card on it, but today I got an email of incurring charges of $573 (i don’t even have the money) which they charged without even upgrading from free trial. I contacted the support but it does not look good.

their reply was,

According to my resources,

  1. Free trial begins when you first sign up to your first billing account.
  2. Once the billing account setup is completed, the free trial begins automatically on the same day.
  3. The free trial ends either when the $300 has been depleted or when a 3 month period has elapsed, whichever comes first.

I understand that you are not aware of the situation. I will raise the adjustment request to reverse the charges to my specialized team.

However, to stop all the upcoming charges please disable the project by following the steps listed in the article [1] .

Once you have disabled the billing for the projects, it usually takes 32 hours for the final charges to propagate on the billing account. I would raise an adjustment request then.

if anyone experienced anything like this, please share your experience!!

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2

For future reference, at some point, you upgraded from a free trial to a paid billing account. You did this by either clicking activate billing or via some other mechanism. We require folks to activate billing for some cases, such as some GPU’s.

So long as you do not activate billing, you will never be charged outside of your free trial. Support has offered to help you out this time, so that’s great, but please be careful in the future!

3

I am not sure if you actually read their response?

Disable the project as mentioned and wait for the team to get back on possibly adjusting charges so you don’t get charged as they acknowledged you may not be aware of the rules.

4

I learned the hard way as you lol. The first thing I do now on every project is to setup a bill warning

5

Follow the steps provided and feedback to support.

Normally for first case offender, Google will waive the charges (definitely on a case to case basis to differentiate legit ignorance or is it a misuse)

6

Hello, I have met the same problem as you but I can’t find the email to contact the support. May I ask you how did you contact them?

7

Hi, for those of you shocked by the amount of money Google is trying to charge you after the Trial has ended (as I was a few days ago). I have good news.

Google will forgive you that (if that is your first time). You just need to do two things - contact a person in Google (the hard part), write an explanation and ask for forgiveness.

Act 1 - Contact Real Human Google Support (RHGS)

To contact a real Google human you need to chat with their bot and “convince” it that it really can’t help you.

  1. Go here: https://cloud.google.com/support/billing
  2. Press “Go to the Google Cloud console”
  3. (Make sure you are on the right Google account)
  4. In the Google Cloud Billing Support press “Billing Support”
  5. A Billing Assistant will open, press “Contact Billing Support”
  6. Select your Billing Account
  7. Chat with it for a while until it says “Here is what I’ve found” or “I can’t help you” and displays small two options under a message (Search for something else, Continue to support)

Here is what worked for me:

Msg 1: Please I desperately need to contact a real human support
Msg 2: I’ve gotten into the financial strain after I’ve forgotten to turn off my project charging.

  1. Press on “Continue to support”

  2. Now it should give you an option to chat with the REAL HUMAN

If this option is not shown, you are likely on the different Google Account than where you have the Google Cloud setup

Bonus - Another way to contact RHGS

If you don’t have access for your billing account for some reason, then you can contact them here.

  1. Go here: https://support.google.com/cloud/contact/cloud_platform_unknown_charges?sjid=12645086771333631230-EU
  2. Done

Act 2 - Craft a compelling message

This is a whole new chapter and I don’t know if it even matters, but ask for forgiveness and they will forgive you.

Context to my situation

I had two projects - A and B. Before my Trial went to the payment mode I turned off the project A, and forgot to turn off the project B. Then I ran some scraping code, that was using the project B that ran for 2 days. It was the end of the month so the Google tried to charge me $300, but I didn’t have enough money on the account. Email came to my attention, that payment was unsuccessful. I looked at it, got shocked, was looking for 2 hours on how to contact RHGS.

note: RHGS is a joke abbreviation

8

i have the same problem and the billing account is closed and cannot be reopened and i need help i don’t know how to solve this

9

how did you reach them? i mean how to reach the support team? in basic plan i only have bots. but i want to reach a human, can i do it without any cost?

10

Op, what’s your problem? Google has said they will adjust the overage. Problem solved. Not sure what’s your concern when they said they will reverse the expenses after you disable your resources.

11

I would appreciate it if you could verify your information.

My experienced told me otherwise. I was using GCP for my outline VPN service. It used to be that after free trial period ends, my account simply won’t work anymore and a reminder for upgrade pops up on my cloud console. However today, I found I was incurred a $200 USD bill. Apparently the free trial account that I made in 2023.June got automatically “upgraded”.

In the GCP instructions for some GCP services like here , it clearly says

Starting your paid subscription. If you already added your billing information, you don’t need to do anything. Your paid subscription automatically begins when your trial ends.

12

:(, I can’t afford to pay this price

13

Contact Google Support and explain the situation. They often give you extra credit for the invoiced amount.
If it’s your first time and depending on the agent. But try this way first

14

Hi. Please, how can I contact the google support? I have the same issue today, and I cannot find a way to contact them.