Google killed my $1M ARR startup overnight | Hacker News Reader

Google killed my $1M ARR startup overnight

25 pointsvadumo16 comments

Two days ago I had a working company. $1M ARR, 100k users, a product people actually pay for and depend on. Right now it's dead in the water and I'm locked out of all of it, because Google decided to suspend my entire account.

Someone got hold of one of my API keys and ran up charges on Google's AI services that I never touched. $4,200 hit my card for usage that wasn't mine. Fine, happens I paid the bill. But Google suspended my whole project. Everything lived in there. The backend, and every single customer photo, over a million of them.

So now my users open the app and nothing loads. I can't fix it because I can't even get into the console anymore, they took that away too.

I've spent two days appealing, paying for support just to reach a real human, getting "escalated," and mostly sitting in an automated queue while my business bleeds. No real answer. No timeline. Nothing.

I trusted Google Cloud to hold my customers' data and run my company. Two days of downtime over a charge I didn't make, and all I can do is wait and hope someone over there decides to flip it back on. If you're building anything real, think hard before you put all of it somewhere that can be switched off like this. I'm moving everything I can to AWS.

If anyone at Google sees this, I've got my project ID and case numbers ready. If anyone have any contact that could help, I would appreciate

> If you're building anything real, think hard before you put all of it somewhere that can be switched off like this. I'm moving everything I can to AWS.

What makes you think AWS can’t be switched off in exactly the same way?

This guys. This. I worked at a company where this happened for 8h (different cloud). Luckily DNS managed outside so we could switch and get services up again. But it wasn't a simple tf apply I'll tell ya.

This is the "lost 9" of availability people don't think about.

This can happen to anyone. It is 3rd party risk. Cloud, VPS, colo etc. DNS and backups and recovery runbooks and customer contact details is your last resort.

Google killed my startup in a similar way many years ago. In my case, they turned quota on services I needed down to 0, refused to tell me why, and closed my appeal. I never figured out what went wrong.

I'll never again use a cloud service where I'm not big enough to get quality customer service, which rules out the big clouds. It's too much of a business risk.

damn, feel that pain ...

I spent 2 month talking to google support to fix the "loop" bug in the workflow that blocked my account, I could not to update the data I needed to proceed with "something" and I could not delete the profile because "something was in progress", and the loop started over, one of google service says "you need to go there and fill contact form" -> that contact form reviewed and said: you need to go there (step 1) its not our property, and over and over again ... Even some manager called to from India phone number "Customer support" even him could not realise what is going on with my account ...

ps. Still didn't fix the issue, but got email a few days ago that they finally realised what was the problem and "will" try to resolve it..

Sorry to hear that! Maybe try posting on LinkedIn? This may get traction there

AWS may be better than Google on automated authoritarionism. But that's a low bar to beat. Your fate not in your own hands.

Did you have backups for all your data with a different company?

Even if not, there's definitely a way to recover.

>> I trusted Google Cloud to hold my customers' data and run my company.

Why? Seriously, how did Google earn your trust enough to the degree that you decided to make them the single point of failure for your million $ business?

I feel like you can consider this an education - an expensive one at that.

I've got bad news for your re the cloud

feel ya.

stripe killed my business paypapl killed my business

anything that can kill ur business will . a third party as single point of failure will def kill ur business sooner or later .

having multiple backups multiple clouds multiple payment processors multiple platforms setup and ready to go as soon as your business is printing meaningful money is the least nowdays.

It’s also better to choose one where there’s no relying on a single or a few 3rd parties.

I like any type of business, like for example “influencers”, where you get your payments in a few big chunks, from many different entities, via wire transfer. Enterprise is like that, brokering €1mm+ deals is like that.

Yeah it's very dangerous to rely on Google as a small to medium business. Support is deliberately non existent.

good luck my friend

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