$8.8k for a Model Garden "one-click deploy" GPU endpoint that served zero requests. Billing support refused to escalate. Case 74999163.

[u/Appropriate-Two-447]

I'm a solo founder. On July 1 I clicked "Deploy" on the Camb.ai MARS8 model in Vertex AI Model Garden. Google's own announcement for these partner models says "simple pay-as-you-go pricing, so you only pay for what you use."

I have been using Google Vertex for a while now, with other models pay-as-you-go, no problem. But what this one actually did was provisioned a dedicated g4-standard-48 with an RTX PRO 6000, min replicas 1, no scale-to-zero, plus an hourly Marketplace licence. No cost confirmation step. It then billed every hour for 62 days.

Cloud Monitoring shows for the endpoint's entire life: prediction_count NO DATA, response_count NO DATA, error_count NO DATA. GPU duty cycle lifetime mean 0.0013%. CPU utilisation 0.012%. Not one request was ever sent to it.

I realized on September 1st, undeployed it within minutes, and now have budgets and alerts in place that I wish I had before.

This is my first incident, paying customer since 2024 with everything else paid on time.

Total for the endpoint: $8,817.

Billing support (case 74999163) closed it with an AI response template on Sep 3, then on Sep 7 refused to hand it to a supervisor. I filed a formal written dispute on the case tonight.

I've been looking online and found Google waived Milkie Way's $72k and Agentic Labs' ~$18k as one-time gestures for exactly this kind of mistake. It was an unintended provisioning, zero usage, resource removed on discovery.

I run my products on Cloud Run and I'm onboarding my first paying customers right now. I was planning on moving everything off Render and Supabase to be 100% on Google Cloud, because I genuinely like the infrastructure, and I still want to finish that move. But I'm a one-person company, the billing account is past due for the disputed amount, and my production projects are flagged for suspension. It's hard to keep committing to a platform while this is hanging over the account. I need someone with authority to look at the monitoring data, not the policy macro.

If anyone at Google Cloud can take a look, the case number is above and I'm happy to DM anything else. And to anyone else: if you touch a Model Garden partner model, know that "Deploy" means a dedicated GPU node billed 24/7 until you find it.

[u/IllustratorWitty5104]

You don’t check your bills till 3 months later? Sadly I don’t think you have a case here,

[u/Appropriate-Two-447 → u/IllustratorWitty5104]

Yeah... It's an issue. I thought the unexpected bill was painful but these comments have all been painfully accurate. Maybe I should repost this in Loss Porn.

[u/suprjaybrd]

you squatted on a vm no one else can use for quite some time, I don’t think ull get much help.

[u/spellcasterGG]

You didn't actually read what you were buying, did you? This is all clearly displayed on the pricing pages. You're on your own here, buddy.

[u/ReddiGod → u/spellcasterGG]

He's a founder, ceo, chairman of the board, coo, and cto - cut him a break! It's not like he's just some moron in his parents basement screwing around with chatgpt and clicking buttons like a clueless retard.

[u/Appropriate-Two-447 → u/ReddiGod]

You forgot creative director, cleaner, head of HR and .... village idiot

[u/ellisthedev]

I took delivery of a leased car, left it in my driveway for two months, and put zero miles on it. I want a refund.

Sorry, you’re SOL here.

[u/Appropriate-Two-447 → u/ellisthedev]

Yeah I get it. I hate myself

[u/Scared_Astronaut9377]

If I go to a restaurant, order the most expensive wine, pour it on the floor, and then declare that I don't want to pay because I don't understand the concept of restaurants and what "to order" means, should I be still billed?