n_u_l_l

It is totally hidden but you don’t actually have to add a billing account if you’re sure that you stay below the $200 monthly usage. You can find it here: https://cloud.google.com/maps-platform/user-guide/pricing-ch... "Is a credit card or billing account required?"

I also experienced similar issues when I was still freelancing and managed the hosting for some clients.

I wanted to host clients on Google Cloud or AWS but letting clients make an account they are unable to manage looked like a bad idea to me. If their website gets a lot of unexpected (maybe unwanted) traffic, they get a large bill which they blame me for. Because of this reason I had to go with shared hosting for small clients, and Heroku for companies that cared about uptime so everyone always knew what the costs are.

Something like billing limits would fix this. So freelancers could host their clients websites on their own account (or using AWS organizations) and charge their clients the billing limit for a year upfront.

Google can change their prices at any time, and they just proved that they do.

There is some kind of trust I have/had in cloud providers to be fair when it comes down to vendor lock-in. One of the things I expect a cloud provider to do is not suddenly increase prices and instead give their clients a reasonable period (a year would be perfect, but I think 6 months is a reasonable period) so they can change their usage to minimize their new costs according to the new pricing or transfer to another provider if the costs are too high.

But Google just proved that they don’t really care about their clients. If you made an app that heavily relied on the Google Maps API, and you spend $3K a month now, you just received a mail that your costs might be increasing to $60K a month and you might need to drop all your current projects/tasks to migrate the app to another service.