Billing charges incurred on a project application that has been disabled on app engine [getting-started]

[Mobile Market]

Hi Everyone,

Would anyone know how to stop my application on app engine from incurring more costs after it has been disabled in the project settings, with no instances running?

I tried to run the getting-started app on a project. The billing account isn't mine, but I asked someone so I could start testing on GCP, hoping it would be on the free tier for testing. Unfortunately, the getting-started app on github by default would be deployed in the flex env (and not the standard env, where it would have been on the free tier), so some costs were incurred. The app was deployed but could not receive API requests due to some versioning (config) issue, so I was surprised that after a day, there were billing charges from the Flex environment usage.

I tried to modify app.yaml by removing  the "flex" env, and also setting max_instances in basic scaling to 1. The API is still not receiving requests, so I disabled the app in the settings. After another day, some charges are still incurred. 

Does anyone know why this is? Also, how to fix this so there are no more charges? 

And which starter code for GCP in github would not incur charges by default?

Thanks.

Regards,

[Osvaldo Lopez Acuña]

If you disable an app, you should also disable billing for that app [1], as the app can still be charged for fixed billing costs, like datastore storage.

While the app is disabled, requests to your app will fail. You may continue to incur charges from other Google Cloud products. For example, if your project has exceeded the free quota for Cloud Storage, you will continue incurring charges for storage.[2]

App Engine does not provide a free tier in the flexible environment as you can read in this document[3], so to not incur charges by default try standar environment because it has a free tier for App Engine resources. 

You could try this example[4]. As is stated: There are no costs associated with running this guide. Running this sample app alone does not exceed your free quota. But after finishing it and to avoid incurring charges, you can delete your Cloud project to stop billing for all the resources used within that project as established here [5].

This is a recommended github project [6] that is used to test GAE but use it in standar environment because, as described above, a flexible environment doesn’t have a free tier.

[1]:https://cloud.google.com/billing/docs/how-to/modify-project?visit_id=637921382749559972-959610604&rd=1#disable-billing 

[2]:https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/managing-costs#disable_manally 

[3]:https://cloud.google.com/appengine/pricing 

[4]:https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java-gen2/create-app 

[5]:https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java-gen2/create-app#clean-up 

[6]:https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/standard/java-gen2/create-app#download_the_hello_world_app