I’m a practicing surgeon (25 years), AI2030 Global Fellow, Co-Editor-in-Chief at StatPearls, and CEO of EdAI Systems. I’m participating in the MedGemma Impact Challenge building PMAI-Gemma, a privacy-preserving personal medical AI for chemotherapy patients that uses MedGemma 4B for on-device inference with a four-tier data sharing framework.
I’m posting here because I’ve exhausted normal billing support channels and I’m hoping someone from the Health AI or DevRel team can point me in the right direction.
The situation: When I set up my MedGemma endpoint on Vertex AI for the contest, I believed I had disabled the services after initial testing (I moved development to a Hugging Face instance a contest partner provided). The Vertex AI services continued running. $8,573 in charges accrued on zero actual usage, no inference calls, no production workload.
Google billing support reviewed my account, confirmed the situation, and after consulting their internal team committed to a $7,716 adjustment. That commitment was then reversed by a different internal team without explanation. I’ve now received two denials.
The contest deadline is February 24. If this billing issue suspends my GCP account, I lose not just my contest submission but my entire business infrastructure; EdAI Systems runs on GCP and generates psychometrically validated board certification exam questions for multiple medical specialty boards.
I’m building PMAI-Gemma because the problem is personal, my wife is on her third round of chemotherapy, and the project focuses on individual-based health monitoring for cancer patients using MedGemma’s open-weight architecture for privacy-preserving on-device inference. A combination of poor insurance, aggressive cancer, frequent travel and inability to work much has exhausted our savings.
I understand billing support has processes and constraints. But the charges came from setting up infrastructure for Google’s own contest, using Google’s own model, on Google’s own cloud. A support agent made a specific commitment after due diligence, and that commitment was reversed.
If anyone from the HAI-DEF team, Kaggle team, or DevRel can help me reach someone with authority to review this, I’d be very grateful. I have the full chat transcript and billing details.
Billing case: 67486061
John Ferguson, MD, FACS
CEO, EdAI Systems | The Ferguson Clinic, Honolulu, HI
MedGemma Impact Challenge participant