I just happened to notice that the project that I deployed my app to has racked up £11.90 of billable costs in the past month.
I’ve no idea why - I’m the only person who’s used the app, and that was just to try to get a connection to google photos working. What’s more worrying is there’s no way of seeing how that cost was generate - just a total cost per day - no itemisation of the api’s or prompts used to give me a clue.
I looked on google cloud console itself and there is slightly more info:
Gemini API at £11.89 driven by £11.89 from Project Yesterday Today and £11.89 from Region global and £4.77 from SKU **Generate_content image output token count for Gemini 2.5 Flash Native Image Generation
I think, after spending ages looking at the data it might be from a couple of times when I was trialling some photo to video as part of the app - in the app studio. The results were bad - it completely ignored my instructions to keep features the same, so my mum and dad from their wedding photo looked like strangers.
I don’t see how Google can justify charging me £5 a pop to create some unusable footage, and then not tell me it was going to charge me beforehand when I had promoted google AI studio as a free product. Total rip off.
If I was making actual videos, that would be one thing, but to charge for a useless result from a prototype is outrageous.**