Shame it doesn't actually protect you, this startup [1] had a spending limit and they racked up charges so fast even Google's own billing system couldn't keep up.

In typical Google fashion it's luck of the draw if you get saved or lose your home [2]

[1] https://blog.tomilkieway.com/72k-1/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25378899

Note that billing budget feature which they used, is, to use the technical term, fucking worthless. All that does is sends an email notification.

I updated my post to link to the section about capping costs, though that still has the delay and won't totally save you.

> and won't totally save you

What a pointless (and perhaps malicious) feature. If something slow is going on, I can check it manually.

It is when something fast is going on that I need automated emergency stops.

Disabling billing, from your link:

> Note: There is a delay of up to a few days between incurring costs and receiving budget notifications. Due to usage latency from the time that a resource is used to the time that the activity is billed, you might incur additional costs for usage that hasn't arrived at the time that all services are stopped.

So still pretty useless. Apparently they do have real-time billing updates via PubSub, but then it's up to you to code what to do when you spend too much. If you're in an exploring phase for [GCP PRODUCT X] you're not going to preemptively write a safeguard to turn off [GCP PRODUCT X] in case of too high billing updates.

It's better than nothing, but kind of a slap in the face that they do have all the tools to really allow people to have a hard spending limit, but they don't.

I've heard the argument "but it's too dangerous, people might lose non-backed up data", but that also happens if you set a Billing Limit, just that the billing limit will kill all your projects AND still let you rack days of over-the-budget billing.

The capping costs sample code in my updated link warns you that it will go and forcibly stop assets, possibly deleting data, due to suspended billing. It still has the same notification delay so it's not a total panacea, but it does help alleviate some of the fear that I'll accidentally end up with a huge bill at the end of the month due to a small misconfiguration or for forgetting to shut down a GPU instance or something.