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Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

As J. Paul Getty once mused[1]:

> If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.

Crappy situation for OP and his startup, but I find the part about reading up on bankruptcy to be a bit premature.

Perhaps not the most ethical choice, but what stops OP from just not paying the bill, and finding a different cloud provider? Obviously they'll want to not repeat the "experiment", but seriously... there's no mechanism at Google to stop a new client from running up a near-$100k bill in a single day?

That's absurd, and should be a learning lesson for Google more than this startup. Some malicious actor could apparently consume hundreds of thousands of dollars of Google resources and "get away" with it.

Wait and see what happens, then deal with it - would be sane advice.

[1] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/j_paul_getty_129274

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OP here.

Bankruptcy fear was real at the time. Google has at least a few thousand lawyers on payroll. They probably also have a process of handling delinquencies and sending them notices. A quick look at the lawyer fee to just manage the case, let alone fight it, is enough for bootstrapped company to raise hands.

+1 to bad actors possibility. I shared this with Google team, I'm not sure what they have done since.

We are out of that situation and I wrote the post so others, relatively new to Cloud don't make same mistakes.

Fail fast is a very bad idea with Cloud.

All true, and good points you raise.

However, Google's army of lawyers costs them real money, where your bill is largely made up numbers.

Perhaps the true cost is still enough to warrant sic'ing their lawyers on your company.

Even in that situation, a wait-and-see approach is still pretty advisable. The worst case scenario was already known to you - bankruptcy.

Nothing Google or their lawyers do would change that worst-case outcome, and if Google was aware you literally don't have $72k, and might just declare bankruptcy and walk away, they'll be much more eager to negotiate a more reasonable bill and settle your account. It's exactly as J. Paul Getty said...

Very glad it's being worked out and you will not have to go down that path.

> Even in that situation, a wait-and-see approach is still pretty advisable. The worst case scenario was already known to you - bankruptcy.

You could even go scorched earth, represent yourself, and drag it out as long as possible. "Your honor, I'm a free man on the land and all I was doing was travelling the information super highway. I'm not bound by your laws!" Haha.

This is why you create a shell company to use cloud services with while your real company leases the servers from that company. As soon as you run up a bill you can’t pay you shut down the whole shell company and reopen a new one.

One of my favorite quotes of all time. J. Paul Getty was quite the weirdo. His Wikipedia article is worth a look, especially the section on his frugality.

Lol. I love it. I moved to a state I'd never considered because it had the largest, cheapest building in the US.

It's 220,000 square feet, but I've lived in a tent out back for the last 6 months because I can't get an occupancy permit, it's not zoned residential, and I refuse to pay rent on an apartment.

You live in a 220,000 square foot building?! Is this an abandoned missile silo or something? I want to know more.

It's the old headquarters of Varco Pruden. They manufactured steel buildings, and there are long, wide manufacturing bays with overhead cranes. You can see much more on my YouTube channel. I've got a few videos of different areas.

This is the first video I made there showing a bit of the size: https://youtu.be/qdkLzioUiAE

> It's 220,000 square feet

Is it an old airplane hangar?

As an interesting coincidence, large part of Google Cloud organization resides in a building that was formerly headquarters of Getty Images, a company founded by Mark Getty, a grandson of J. Paul Getty.

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