App Engine Standard - Instance charges

[George Bittmann]

Did anything change recently with how the standard environment is billed? 

I'm seeing charges on a lot of projects that are hosting extremely low traffic websites that should never incur instance charges at all let alone getting up over a dollar or two half way into the month.

Has anyone else seen this or know what might be going on?

[Karolína Netolická]

Hi George, one thing I can think of is that if you are using min_idle_instances setting, this could be causing apps with low traffic to incur a bill. For free apps we recommend setting min_idle_instances to zero.

[George Bittmann]

Thanks for the suggestion Karolína. All of these projects have had min_idle_instances at default and have been that way since they were created most are at least 6 months with the current configuration and incurring no charges.

Billing indicates the charges are front end hours, but if you look at appengine > quotas > usage history every day shows 0 charges for the month.

I'm thinking that for some period of time, a couple days perhaps, our projects were charged as if the free 28 frontend hours did not exist. The amount of hours billed does seem generally related to the traffic of the site, but as I said these sites are extremely low traffic and would on a very busy day would not reach 20 frontend hours.

[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hey George,

I recommend opening a ticket with Billing to resolve this, as you'll surely get a specific response, while this forum is intended less for specific-issue one-on-one technical support and is instead meant to be a forum where users discuss the platform, services, design patterns, etc.

Cheers,

Nick
Cloud Platform Community Support

[Lawrence Mok]

Hi Nick I have exactly the same issues, dealing with the junior billing staff has been very frustrating and they are unable to acknowledge the problem at all.

I hope your team should take this issue seriously as my billing is going sky rocket (something like 10X times more than the normal level).

Please also see the other guy and my screen shots in the other thread:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-appengine/X6sWwvUGbzQ

[Nick (Cloud Platform Support)]

Hey Lawrence,

Unfortunately as I'm not involved in Billing Support I have no knowledge of your case with them. I can only advise that you explain to them clearly the way in which you believe your app's observed behaviour has differed from our SLA's or our Pricing documentation, and they should be able to help you out in whatever way possible based on that.

Cheers,

Nick
Cloud Platform Community Support 

[Lawrence Mok]

Hi Nick,

I did explained thousands of times and they still insist the billing is correct and just ignore every piece of evidence I provided. Could you help by informing someone in Google that should really take care of this case for me? I think every staff in Google who acknowledge this case seriously and report back to the proper personnel instead of treating it as someone else responsibility.

Thanks,

Lawrence 

[Nickolas Daskalou]

We had issues with billing over a year ago, brought it up with Google Cloud's billing department, who, like in your experience, told us all is well (when we knew it wasn't).

In the end it wasn't worth our time and energy to push it further.

It did feel though that Billing support was disconnected from the inner workings of Google's Cloud platform.

I hope a dedicated Product Manager from Google Cloud is reading this, so they can read our feedback and add it to the list of improvements needed on Google Cloud and its appendages.

Nick

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[George Bittmann]

I'm going through the process now with billing and the initial response was involves them comparing the billable time to the amount, and that is correct. 

According to what is billing is seeing they are doing what they should be doing the problem is that the data they are being provided is wrong.

We need the team that is responsible for generating the data billing uses to fix the data they are providing. Specifically the daily free frontend hours, are not being accounted for when passing the billable hours over to billing. How do we reach this team?

There is money on the table so this does have a pretty high level of urgency.

[Lawrence Mok]

The issue is now being taken care of by Google, please refer to https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/36201328 for updates.