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Comment by euph0ria | Hacker News Reader

To Google people, do you have any suggestions for startups how to start using your services for production workloads and: 1) Not having to take the $250 monthly fee per dev that needs to be able to contact you. Just increases the start cost massively for your services.

2) Not having to worry about being hell-banned and not being able to restore your account with Google, such as "guilty-by-association" for devs in PlayStore/gApps etc trickling over to closing down the whole account. We have read so many of those stories here on HN lately that I'm terrified to use Google for anything business related as we run the risk of losing everything.

The Cloud Run product looks great and would love to use it but the above two issues makes it a no go for us.

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Have you reached out to: https://cloud.google.com/developers/startups/

They should be able to give you a pretty large chunk of credit (I assume it'll cover support as well). It should also give you folks to contact and help prevent the latter issue.

Thanks, however, it seems limited to 12 months only, which is usually the initial prototyping phase of a product prior to launching. Also, feels strange to have to be in some type of program and beg for mercy with a contact person in order to alleviate the extremely strange behavior of permanent cancellation by algorithms. What if the contact person we have gotten to know have moved on to a different business etc? Feels unreliable.

If you purchase Google production support, with credits or otherwise, it's available 24/7 and not tied to a single "contact person". In addition, billing support (which includes things like being suspended for fraud or abuse) is free, available to all and also 24/7. All these channels are responded to by real live humans who can see what "the algorithm" did and why, and overrule it if need.

Disclaimer: I work at GCP and used to work in support.

I believe you are incorrect: https://cloud.google.com/support/ states $250/month/user. Hence, it seems to be tied to a single contact person, why else would it state pricing per user?

Regarding suspension, if this is the case, why do we see so many desperate cries for help from people whom are unable to get in touch with anyone at all at Google to help them with their termination? They have to resort to public blog posts and hope that a good Samaritan at Google comes along, sees them and acts.

They all have the same story, "couldn't get in touch with anyone, "tried to appeal, denied without explanation" and they all had several days if not weeks of downtime.

Ah, I see what you mean: that's referring to users on the customer's side, not Google's. You also can adjust the number & role of users on the fly, so you can create another production support user if somebody else needs to file a ticket urgently.

From what I've seen, the stories about people having trouble tend to be from Android app developers getting blocked from the Play Store, not GCP users.

I can understand the concern about getting your account banned, but: if after 12 months, your startup can't afford $250/month for support, you probably have bigger problems.

To put it another way: do you think the level of support that Google would be able to provide is less valuable than a few percent of an engineer's salary?

That categorization dismisses a host of evenings & weekend part time bootstrapping startups.

Google support seems to charge per person, so suppose you are a few persons, ie at least 3 sharing the support then it's $750/month. Also, you are assuming US salaries, when looking at many other countries $250 is upwards 10% of the salary. Google support is valuable, but, going with AWS for example is a lot cheaper. Now, if you are a VC-backed or otherwise funded company, then this is a non-issue, but there are hundreds of thousands of businesses that have a total spend on infra that would be less than the support fee from Google.

GCP Community Slack is a great place to get access to both Googlers and non Googlers using and understanding platform.

I recommend starting by asking your questions on StackOverflow or other public forums. Many googlers (including me) are very active on StackOverflow and monitoring specific tags. For Cloud Run, please use `google-cloud-run`.

Hell-banning is by far my biggest fear with Google. The idea that you could be banned for life without any explanation just seems completely insane. It feels dystopian.

A couple of direct recommendations to combat this fear.

1. Sales teams can help here. You have a sales rep that you should meet/interact with so that if something like were to happen, you have a person you can reach out to. There has been a lot of news about hiring within sales.

2. Set up a proper Cloud Identity domain and organization. Manage users this way as opposed to consumer accounts.

3. Set up an invoiced billing account

I responded further down but on point 2:

A couple of direct recommendations to combat the fear of being banned.

2. Set up a proper Cloud Identity domain and organization. Manage users this way as opposed to consumer accounts.

3. Set up an invoiced billing account

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