> Google let go of our bill as a one time gesture!
We've seen this happen with similar stories on AWS. Neither platform supports prepayment with a hard limit on costs, and this seems unlikely to change.
Yeah a friend of mine wanted a real cert, not letsencrypt (I don't understand how that is more real but ok), as a bit of a noob he clicked around on the AWS website and some days later had a bill op 1500 eur. They also nulled it. Still, this scares the hell out of me.
AWS Certificate Manager gives you free non-extended SSL to your machine, it's pretty nifty.
Yeah, it seems to be by design, hard to imagine otherwise.
I can sympathise with some of these stories, like the ones where an overnight DDOS attack racks up a huge unexpected bill, but this one in particular is just a story of gross incompetence and negligence. The guy hacked together some code in a few days and deployed it to a service with unlimited billing without any kind of sanity checks and without even understanding what he was paying for. He’s an ex-Googler, it’s not like he hasn’t heard stories like this before. And the takeaway? “Oops don’t deploy buggy code” and “I shouldn’t have used the default settings”. OK, sure, let me know how that works out for you.
But "The Guy" was under the impression that he could do so because he set sane limits in both GCP and his Credit Card.