!!!URGENT!!! Billing Error in App Engine Instance Hours, charges skyrocketing

[Lawrence Mok]

Since the beginning of this month, the charges for Instance Hours are calculated wrongly. The 28 hours free quota were not included in the final billing calculation. See attached screen shots for details:

[Marco Galassi]

Contact the billing support here: https://support.google.com/cloud/contact/cloud_platform_billing

[Lawrence Mok]

We did contacted billing support and go thorough 20 mails, spent 6 days without any progress, they don't recognize the problem at all and keep charging us

We might seek legal action instead. 

[Lawrence Mok]

Here's our detailed usage exported from the console:

Date	Name	Unit	Price	Used	Free	Billable	Charge
3/13/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.97	28	0	0
3/12/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.4	28	0	0
3/11/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.97	28	0	0
3/10/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.99	28	0	0
3/9/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.99	28	0	0
3/8/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	24	28	0	0
3/7/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.98	28	0	0
3/6/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	24	28	0	0
3/5/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.98	28	0	0
3/4/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	24	28	0	0
3/3/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.97	28	0	0
3/2/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	23.97	28	0	0
3/1/2017	Frontend Instance Hours	Hour	0.05	24	28	0	0

And yet, the billing team is supplies us another log and keep saying the bills are correct.

I wonder how a big company makes such a big mistake and still can't recognize it after so many days, spent so many hours.

I'm very disappointed.

[Kyle Finley]

Lawrence & Marco,

For what's it's worth I'm seeing the same issue. 

Marco, If you would like billing account number, please feel free to contact me.

Lawrence, thank you for posting this. Would you mind updating this thread once the issue has been resolved? I'll need to follow the same procedure.

Thanks,

Kyle

[Lawrence Mok]

Thanks Kyle for letting us know you are getting the same issue.

I am having great frustration with the billing support team, up to now they still don't recognize the problem (I had over 30 emails to and from them over 6 days, escalated twice).

If they really bill us the wrong charge at the end of this month, may be we can do a class action.

Of course, solving that peacefully is our first objective.

[George (Cloud Platform Support)]

On the "usage history" page with the vertical list of usage values, where you land if you navigate to app engine --> quotas --> view usage history in the dev. console, there is an information label on top saying: "These costs are estimates based on App Engine list prices." Estimates may be wrong to some extent, as they are what they are named: only estimates, in contrast to guaranteed and double-checked values. In your case the estimates are mostly 0.01. In all cases, these values are provided for orientation and best-effort basis, just to provide an estimate. They are not meant to be compared with final values. 

The "Google Cloud Platform Billing Support" page may help you to contact Customer support for billing, and clarify similar cases. More information is to be found on the "Billing and Payments Support" documentation page. 

The situation is as follows: some projects in free trial have been billed and charges are going to be returned to the affected Clients. Google Cloud Status Dashboard displays a warning to this effect. 

The "Google Cloud Platform Billing Support" page provides the same information. If you are in this situation, the erroneous charges will be refunded to you. 

Lawrence: what is the project name affected by unjustified charges and at what moment? You can provide this information in confidence via email. 

[Lawrence Mok]

George, this is very irresponsible for your answer. You should report back to your boss for this case instead. Or I will be reporting to your boss.

If you just take 5 seconds to look at the screen shots carefully, you would see the $0.01 is from Code and Static File Usage, not from App Engine Instance Hours.

[Somaya Sarathbabou]

+1 here.

We have the same issue for the App to be billed, for the past few months/years, we have never been billed for this usage, now why all of a sudden, if its going to be charged users shd be made aware by a proper announcement or given us some time where we could think of migrating our apps.

We have been using GAE for the past 5 years without a single charge. As all others mentioned, no point in chking with the Billing Team, as they ll ding dong for 100days left without any proper solution.I also have prior experience with the Billing Team with several ding dongs and finally I gave up and i have all the trail emails history too.
They dont know the tech part thats their issue, pity on them

Plz check this urgently and do a CREDIT REVERSE for all of us on time. in fact, a commercial goodwill should also be provided for all of us, as we are wasting our time here in detecting several Google based bugs.

App Engine Frontend Instances: 133.418 Hours (Source: xxxx]) -$1.27

I can give my project ID in PM, if required for investigation purposes.

Pl let us know faster for this Charging issue.
I m sure lot of other people are still unware of this Billing Issue, i cant imagine how will they respond to, once they see  the month end invoice and the Support Calls made to Google.

Thanks,
Ss

[joshuamo]

Based on the screenshots above and the multiple reports in this thread, something seems off (or unexplained) with regards to billing for GAE Standard / Free tier apps.  Can one of the affected in this thread reply privately to me with the following information?

1. Project ID of an affected project

2. A date that you noticed the change in frontend instance hours billed for

That will help us target the investigation and, hopefully, bring us to a quicker understanding of the issue.

[Lawrence Mok]

I can determine the date that happen to me is from 1st March 2017.

This is because most of my instance runs exactly 24 hours a day and by calculations I can determine the charges should start very clear to 1st March 2017.

Once you can confirm you're a Google staff I will provide you the project IDs

[Josh Moore]

Quick update- I've filled an issue internally to investigate this and have been working with the GAE Billing engineering team to troubleshoot.

The public issue for this is Issue #36201328; I suggest everyone impacted click the "Me too!" button to stay connected as we make updates to the issue.  The public issue will be the most up-to-date source of information, but I'll also update this thread once that issue is resolved.

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Josh Moore |

Cloud Solutions Engineer |

josh...@google.com |

[Steven Prosser]

Want to bump this. What the heck is going on? I had this same issue. The dollar amount for the March 1-14 period was a few dollars for frontend instances. I checked my daily quota charges, and they were all zeros for frontend instances from Mar1-Mar14. Contacted billing support, and notified them that there was a bug somewhere. Support person passed my info (same sort of screenshots as provided when topic started) on to someone up the food chain (support agent did a good job here). Crickets after that of course, but small dollars == not worth my time. Today I got another bill. The time period is Mar1-Mar17. First HUGE PROBLEM: it appears that my credit card was charged a second time for the instance hours in the Mar1-14 period which had already been charged to the cc (first invoice). Wow. It appears I have been charged twice for one app. Additionally another set of front instance charges were added for another app that had zero quota during this period. Note to whomever reads these posts at Google: this appears serious. If you have charged me twice for the same invoice item this is fraud. However I cannot reconcile anything because NOTHING other than your invoice shows I have incurred any charges above the free 28 hours per day. Please do not advise me to contact billing support. Already done that - crickets is crickets. Something seems really broken re: quota charges and the 28 hour daily free tier. Again, What the heck????

[Vitaly Bogomolov]

Same issue.

Incorrect charges for several app id for Mar 2017. For example: $11.84 for app with daily spending limit $0.01

[Steven Prosser]

Need to clarify previous statement: I was invoiced twice, but credit card was only billed once. Sorry I misread the situation. Still no relationship between invoiced amounts and quota usage reports. 

[Josh Moore]

Thank you for your patience as we sort this out and for your help in diagnosing the issue. We have identified the root cause as a price sheet misconfiguration that didn't correctly apply free hours to users with multiple App Engine projects under the same billing account between March 8th and March 19th. The issue was fixed on March 20, and we're in the process of calculating and issuing the appropriate credits. We will update you when this process is complete.

As mentioned before, you can also follow along on public issue #36201328.  

Thanks again,

Josh

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