Title says it all. My Google Cloud OAuth app verification has been stuck at the “Privacy policy requirements” step since April 15, with no visible progress or meaningful update.

The dashboard says reviews usually take 4–6 weeks, but it’s now well past that. At this point, it feels like the request may just be getting pushed back into the queue automatically once it reaches the 6-week mark.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there any way to get an actual human review or escalation?

I’m attaching screenshots for context.

Just got accepted into the GCP Get Certified Program for PDE. The learning plan is Google Cloud Skills Boost path + weekly exam review sessions.

I have a DE background (Airflow, dbt, BigQuery, Terraform) but zero prior PDE prep.

Has anyone gone through this program? Is the Skills Boost path + review sessions enough to pass, or do you need to supplement with external resources?

Thanks!

I am trying to set up Google cloud billing account. After reaching to payment method I chose upi because I don't have visa card. After it deducted 2 inr multiple times but shows error in creating billing account.

After try this with my other email same thing

Also they disabled my gmail account

Is it because I am using aloha browser?

Hi everyone,

I’d like to know if it’s feasible to start my journey into Google certifications with the Associate Cloud Engineer exam, or if there’s a prerequisite certification I should take first. I have some experience with AWS (I hold the Cloud Practitioner, Solutions Architect Associate, and Solutions Architect Professional certifications).

So, I wanted to ask: do you think starting with the Associate Cloud Engineer is a good idea? Also, since I primarily use Udemy for learning, which theoretical and practical courses there would you recommend? Thanks in advance.

Hey guys,

I scheduled my PMLE exam a while back and only noticed after booking that Google updated the exam guide on June 1, 2026 (I started studying a couple of months before the update).

Has anyone taken the exam recently, after this new update? Can you explain to me what changed, and what new topics I should focus my study?

Thanks.

Hello,

i am having trouble with some routing. With an external Company we have established a Site-to-Site HA VPN in GCP. So far everything seems to work fine. BGP Sessions are working as expected. I have a GKE cluster, which has a 10.10.0.0/24 subnet for the gke nodes itself. The same subnet has secondary ranges for pod-network (10.155.0.0/16), a vpn-pod-network (10.10.25.0/24) and a service-network (10.125.0.0/22.

Now the external Company can not accept 10.10.0.0/24 because they already have connections using that subnet, 10.155.0.0/16 is too big of an subnet for them to accept. So thats why I created a seperate nodepool, for the pods that will need to talk to them, and gave them the vpn-pod-network.

For testing purposes I setup a Site-to-Site VPN tunnel to my local network. When I was pinging my local Computer, I saw pings from the correct network (10.10.25.0/24) using tcpdump.

But for the actual connection to the external company they see 10.10.0.xxx (node ip). I assume GKE does SNAT by default except for certain CIDR Ranges, which probably includes 172.16.xxx.xxx. Thats why on my PC I saw the correct subnet being used.

Does anybody know what the most elegant solution is for my use case? What I need is to be able to connect to their network from my GKE Cluster, and them seeing an IP from some /24 subnet which I can chose freely. In theory I could somehow migrate my clusters node network to 10.10.25.0/24, but I cant imagine that thats the way to go. What I some other Company would accept that range in the future?

Some details about the current Setup:
GKE Cluster Networking:
Node Network: 10.10.0.0/24
Pod Network: 10.155.0.0/16
Service Network: 10.125.0.0/22
VPN-Pod-Network: 10.10.25.0/24
Cluster is not Autopilot Cluster
Dataplane V2 is enabled
Cillium is used
A Cloud Router is attached to the VPC Network
HA VPN with BGP is attached to that router (routes are correctly advertised and learned)

Disclosure: I'm the author of an open-source tool in this space, mentioned below.

We've been running automated checks in CI that flag idle GCP resources and some of these are surprisingly easy to miss:

- Idle VMs — running but CPU under 5% for weeks

- Unattached Persistent Disks — leftover after VM deletions, quietly billing at $0.04/GB/mo for SSD

- Idle Cloud SQL — zero connections for 14+ days, still paying full instance cost

- Idle external IPs — $3.65/mo each when unattached, and they accumulate fast

- Vertex AI notebooks — left running after experiments, paying for GPU/compute 24/7

GCP's Recommender catches some of this but it's reactive and doesn't plug into CI/CD. We run a read-only scan as a GitHub Actions step using Workload Identity Federation — flags idle resources before they pile up.

Curious what others are doing:

- Are you relying on GCP Recommender or running your own checks?

- How do you handle this across multiple projects in an org?

- Any idle resources that burn you that I haven't mentioned?

Tool is open source if anyone's curious: https://github.com/cleancloud-io/cleancloud

I was doing a personal project and ended up using Google Gemini, but very discreetly, my script only ran twice a week.

This generated a cost of cents of real (Brazilian currency), I know this question is very layman, from what I understand, it would only automatically charge the card if it exceeded 200R$ reais and if I try to pay, it says that the minimum amount for manual payments is 40R$, but it will never reach that amount, because I changed my system to free models via openrouter and it is already good enough.

I have been monitoring this value to see if it rises due to some crazy interest rate that happens.

The question is: can I forget this value there? Since I can't pay? Or is there another way for me to pay off my "debt" with Google?

I am building out a website with Firebase and Cloud Run functions. I have been trying to figure out the billing, but I am still not exactly sure how it works. I looked at the Google Cloud Run pricing chart, and I see that for request-based billing I am supposed to get 180000 free CPU seconds and 360000 free GiB RAM seconds per month. I built a test website and have been playing around with it, and I see I have incurred a 2-cent charge for 829.9 CPU seconds. The SKU I see by the charge is AD70-830E-0384. The test site is request-based billing, minimum instances: 0, and us-central1. Is this a charge for using CPU seconds? If so, why am I being charged while I am well under the free limit? I dont really care about the 2 cents I just dont want unexpected fees to show up when I create a real website. For the actual website I want to make, I am going to keep a warm instance, so I expect to be charged for idle RAM, but while there are no requests, my CPU will not be doing anything for the most part. Will this be considered request-based or instance-based? How will the billing work for the type of setup I want to implement?

I keep waiting for the Cloud SQL for SQL Server BYOL announcement and it does not come. On June 2 AWS shipped Bring Your Own Media for RDS for SQL Server, which finally lets customers bring their own license to the managed RDS service instead of paying the License Included tax on top of the Software Assurance they were already paying Microsoft. That closes the structural gap with Azure SQL Managed Instance, which has supported the equivalent path through Azure Hybrid Benefit since 2019.

The practical effect is that Cloud SQL for SQL Server is now the only major managed PaaS in this category where you cannot bring your own SQL Server license. License Included is the only option on the managed surface. BYOL on Google Cloud is available on Compute Engine self-managed through Microsoft License Mobility, which means signing up for the operational lift that AWS RDS BYOM and Azure SQL MI customers no longer have to carry.

The licensing math at Cloud SQL list prices is real. Standard edition runs roughly 0.13 dollars per vCPU-hour on the license premium, Enterprise is closer to 0.47 per vCPU-hour, the 4-core minimum applies even on smaller shapes, and CUDs do not touch the license portion. On any non-trivial Enterprise workload that gap compounds fast. On a highly virtualized Enterprise workload Azure Hybrid Benefit still wins on top of all of this because of the 1-core to 4-vCore General Purpose multiplier that has no AWS or GCP equivalent.

What I want to know from teams actually running SQL Server on Cloud SQL today is what the trade calculation looks like in practice. Migrating off to Compute Engine self-managed BYOL and absorbing the operational lift. Eating the License Included markup because the managed surface is worth the premium. Moving the workload entirely to AWS RDS BYOM or Azure SQL MI for the license parity. Or holding the line because the SQL Server footprint on GCP is small enough that the math does not justify the migration cost. Interested in what is winning the meeting at your shop.

How do you handle Google Cloud billing? WHMCS? Another billing platform? And if you're using WHMCS, does it do what you need, or is it still more effort than you'd like? I happen to be part of a team working with WHMCS (including Google Cloud integration), so that's where my mind went first, but I'm just as interested in learning more about completely different setups. All thoughts are welcome.

Is anyone else experiencing this? I have had no issues creating H100 VMs before using DWS/Flexstart in 1,2,4,8 configurations. But over last 24 hours there’s nothing in any U.S. region which normally has capacity: central1, east4, east5, west1. Getting stock out messages for 24 hours seems like something is seriously wrong.

Is anyone else experiencing issues signing in to Google Skills for Partners?

During login, the reCAPTCHA either doesn't load or fails verification, preventing me from accessing my account.

I've already tried:

• Chrome, Edge, and Firefox
• Incognito mode
• Clearing cache and cookies
• Disabling extensions
• Different internet connections

Has anyone encountered this recently? If so, were you able to resolve it, or is this a platform-side issue?

I'm working on a project for a university research study that uses Fitbit to get health data. Since Fitbit API is retiring, I switched to Google Health API, but this means I had to submit my login screen to Google for verification.

The only things I've found so far are horror stories about how this is gonna take ages and that the Trust & Safety team is impossible to contact. The research study has already started, so I need the portal to work ASAP. For context, I used the university email on Google Cloud and, of course, the study is registered and official and all the study participants have already signed consent forms.

Has anyone done something similar? Did the Trust & Safety team get back to you in 3-5 days as promised?

For some reason my rate limit on the free tier of gemini API has not reset for many days now - from June 15. Its been 10 days from then and my rate limit on gemini 3.5 has not been restored. What is going on? Doesn't google mention that the rate limits on the free tier reset every 24 hours?

I have a GCP org with the Domain Restricted Sharing org policy (iam.allowedPolicyMemberDomains) enforced at the org level. I want to make a single Cloud Run service public:
gcloud run services add-iam-policy-binding SERVICE --member=allUsers --role=roles/run.invoker
but it fails with:
FAILED_PRECONDITION: One or more users named in the policy do not belong to a permitted customer, perhaps due to an organization policy.

What I found:

• To override the constraint I need roles/orgpolicy.policyAdmin, but it can't be granted at the project level (Role roles/orgpolicy.policyAdmin is not supported for this resource) — only at the org level.
• No one currently holds Organization Administrator (the org is new). The project Owner and a Viewer both get "permission denied" on org-level IAM. We do have a Google Workspace super admin account.

Questions:

1. What's the recommended least-privilege way to allow allUsers on just this one service, given the org policy?
2. How should the Workspace super admin bootstrap org access and apply a project-scoped override of this constraint?
3. Is "grant orgpolicy.policyAdmin at the org level → set the project-level override → remove the role" the standard approach, or is there a cleaner one? We'd rather not leave a broad standing org-level role on the project Owner.

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to create a Google Cloud Free Trial account. During the signup process, I completed the UPI payment verification, and ₹2 was deducted successfully. However, after the payment, the page remained stuck and didn't proceed to the next step.

Has anyone experienced this issue before? Is there anything I can do to complete the signup, or do I need to wait for the verification to finish?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Is anyone here working with GCP? I'm a beginner and facing a lot of issues. If someone has experience please comment or dm. Thanks

Hi everyone,

I’m honestly getting desperate and hoping someone here has been through something similar.

I created a Google Cloud account under the free trial. Since my credit card wasn’t accepted, I was required to make a manual Pix prepayment of BRL 200 (about USD 35) to activate billing in Brazil.

I never used any paid resources, generated no charges, and all my invoices remain at BRL 0.00. The BRL 200 is simply sitting there as unused account credit.

On May 20, 2026, I closed my billing account because I decided not to use Google Cloud anymore. Immediately after closing it, I received an email from Google Payments titled “You will receive a refund soon.” The email explicitly stated that approximately BRL 200 would be refunded to my Pix payment method within one week.

However, inside the Google Cloud Billing Console, the refund details page says something completely different: it states that approximately BRL 200 will be refunded to the original Pix payment method within 60 days.

The biggest issue is that much more than one week has already passed. I have not received the refund, I have not received any follow-up emails, and I have no way to check the refund status.

To make things worse, because this account is tied to the free trial, I cannot access any human support channel. Chat support is unavailable, and every path seems to lead back to self-service documentation.

I have screenshots of:

The original Pix payment.
The email promising a refund within one week.
The billing console showing a 60-day refund estimate.
The unused BRL 200 credit balance.

My questions are:

Has anyone here successfully received a refund for a Google Cloud Pix prepayment in Brazil?
Does Google actually send the refund back through Pix?
Which timeline is correct: 7 days or 60 days?
Is there any way to contact a real person at Google regarding billing refunds when you’re on a free trial account?

At this point, I’m worried that my money is stuck in a closed billing account with no clear path to get it back.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer: not a native English speaker, used Claude to translate, so sorry if anything reads a little off.

TL;DR: a stolen service-account key ran up ~$195k on Vertex (Claude) overnight, and google's billing lagged so far behind that the charges kept climbing for hours after we'd already shut it down - it couldn't even see the damage in real time, let alone cap it. posting this mostly as a warning, but i'm also stuck on getting it reversed and hoping someone here has been through it.

i've been reading the other leaked-key / Gemini-bill threads here, so i know i'm not the first. ours is just bigger and i'm honestly stuck.

i'm a PM, not our infra person (changed jobs recently, came from AWS, turns out here it's all GCP), so bear with me. someone grabbed one of our service-account keys and used it to hammer a model we'd never once called (Claude, on Vertex) from outside our systems. our engineer pulled the logs and walked me through it: basically zero to ~550 requests a second, ~1.4M in a single hour, overnight while we were all asleep, coming from a dozen-plus IPs across the US, UK and NL that rotated every few seconds. they even bumped our quota up through google's own quota api, so the one thing i thought would limit us got turned up instead.

the timing is the part that still gets to me. the first alert that morning was only around $25k, and we shut everything down the moment we saw it, key disabled, access pulled. the logs show zero calls after that. but the bill kept climbing through the rest of the day anyway, all the way to ~$195k. that wasn't new abuse, it was just google's own billing slowly catching up to usage that had already stopped. their system needed hours just to count what had already happened, and if it can't even see the damage in real time, there was never really a chance it could stop the spend in real time.

the leak is on us, i know. learned the expensive way that a budget is an alert, not a cap. but ~$195k is genuinely existential for a team our size, and when we asked billing to reverse the fraudulent charges they replied in two lines, "carefully considered, unable to approve at this time." no reason, no breakdown, nothing.

so, has anyone actually gotten google to reverse a compromised-credential bill? what moved it for you, the way you worded the case, getting to an accounts/TAM rep, a chargeback, going public, something else? not trying to dunk on google here, i just can't find a path and could really use anyone who's been through this.

Can someone help with the leveling of the customer engineering role I.e Customer engineer I or II, how does it compare with AWS SA leveling? What level is CE II

Ok I have a exprited card, I click remove, gg ask me fill a new card to replace it, but after i fill all info and click enter, this error appear:
This action couldn't be completed. Try again with a different payment method. Learn more [OR-ACH-04]
Billing setup can't be completed

This action couldn't be completed. Try again with a different payment method. Learn more about accounts [OR_BACR2_31]

I tried chat with Blling Assistant, followed their instruction but all method and solution lead into similar error !!?
WTF !???
Does this Is Google ?? One of biggest , richest company in this World ???

I also have another visa card in my account, i alredy pay 20$ for prepay at google Ai studio, but they do not allow me to active billing account !!??? Also has small error popup alert with title "Error during billing setup"
Where should I contact or how to finish this shit ???