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Comment by dabedee | Hacker News Reader

As others have said, this is a "feature" for Google, not a bug. There is no easy way to set a hard cap on billing on a project. I spent the better time of an hour trying to find it in the billing settings in GCP, only to land on reddit and figuring out that you could set a budget alert to trigger a Pub/Sub message, which triggers a Cloud Function to disable billing for the project. Insanity.

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My favorite Google LLM benchmark is asking Gemini models to create a script that fetches API usage (just request counts) for a project from GCP.

100% failure rate.

I've yet to receive an accurate response from Gemini about GCP services, beyond completely trivial topics. The most recent, I think, was Gemini advising me that I could attach an existing pd SSD PVC to a n4 or c4 VM. For whatever unknowable reason, Google doesn't allow this and doesn't offer a migration path, and Gemini doesn't "know" anything about it either. It's wild.

Agreed on the fact that it should know, it's their LLM.

What bothers me is even having it do extensive research in documentation, it still can't figure it out.

GCP must simply be so unintuitive that the LLM mind cannot comprehend it.

Call it for what it is, an antifeature, a trap for the user.

As the other user said - this would be an anti-feature and user hostile.

This is a sign that somehow there isn’t sufficient incentive to work on these features.

This is presumably by design: How can it be the vendor's fault if your custom billing protection implementation failed you at a critical time? Much harder to defend against a switch on their dashboard allowing billing overshoot.

This is from my experience the same in AWS and Azure. I would love for a kill-switch if the usage goes above a critical threshold. 5 hours down time will not kill my app but a huge cloud bill might.

It's been a year since I last looked at this, but when I did you could get near-realtime cost metrics for AWS Bedrock via CloudWatch (you get input & output token counts and have to generate the actual price yourself)

> Insanity

You mean cash machine

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