If I use Gemini CLI for a week using it similarly from day to day, averaging $20-30 a day, What would be the cause of a single $394 item one day? I suspect it got caught in a loop in the background. I just remember getting an email on the morning of July 19th saying I had used 80% of my $100 alert, and then I decided to used it less. By mid afternoon I got an email saying I was at 150% usage. The next morning Google charged my bank account $100 and $200. I could see I still had $80 available so I used it very sparingly for the rest of the month. My total bill after all this was over $600 last month and according to the bill one prompt alone was $394.
Iām attempting to get a refund because itās obviously not my usage, as I did not uploads the Library of Alexandria on July 19th. Aside from not eating for the next week while watching for Google to either issue a refund or gaslight me ā has anyone else noticed that sometimes it can cost a fortune instead of just a few dollars? Is this normal?
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I have the same theme. This is absurd. I know that this is not our service, I spent it like this.
Itās as if the keys that we release are leaking through the internal access of employees and are being used for strange purposes. I canāt find an opportunity to view the requests that were sent from my key.
So this is funā¦ just got hit with a Ā£1,653 bill because somehow someone got hold of my API key and went absolutely mental with it.
The carnage:
779 MILLION tokens processed (thatās like 1,500 entire books worth of text)
Generated 43 million tokens of output
Plus some audio generation stuff
All happened in August until I caught it on the 21st
I literally only use Gemini on my phone occasionally for random questions. Thereās no way I could burn through that many tokens if I tried for a year straight.
Hereās the kicker - Google has all these fancy monitoring systems but somehow didnāt think to send me a heads up when my usage went from basically zero to industrial-scale LLM farming overnight. Like, maybe a āhey your account just processed the equivalent of War and Peace 500 times in one dayā alert wouldāve been helpful?
Fighting it obviously - no way Iām paying for some crypto broās operation or whatever they were running with my credentials.
PSA for everyone:
Check your billing regularly (wish I had)
Set up those alert emails yourself since Google apparently wonāt
Googleās passed it to their āaccounts teamā so weāll see if they actually reverse this or try to stick me with the bill. Will report back.
Anyone else been through this nightmare? Did you manage to get the charges reversed?
This is worrying indeed. There should be some very simple (default) way to set a hard limit. Especially for developers who are only testing - and surely in testing phase - things can go wrong. This is bad press indeed and could put developers off trying new products :-(.
Yes, setting a budget wonāt act as a cut off point, just a 50% - 100% warning. This is concerning and def. not enough looking at recent problems with random image API billing and miss use of any API. GOOGLE ā please let us set a fixed budget, itās the least you can do for us.
I got a response from Google, stating they removed 50% of the amount, because of some āinternal policiesā - so Iāve responded stating I will not be paying any of this as it is not usage I have incurred. I am awaiting a further response as I requested escalation and clarification as their āinternal policiesā are not detailed anywhere.
