This cost spike (€290 for search queries tied to €10 of LLM queries) was not caught by my spend cap, which still doesn’t show the overage. The spend cap functionality is not working as intended.
Google preemptively charged my card €200, and I was told by a customer service agent that I will get some money back by the end of the month – I was never told how much. @Ali_Cevik, you and the team need to do a much better job of making things right for customers. Google is holding my money and I don’t even have a guarantee of how much I’ll get back. The erroneous charge should be refunded immediately.
I never received a response from you or Logan, nor did I see anyone from Google post about this outside of this forum.
This incident and the failure of the various systems involved has destroyed my trust in Gemini. There’s not even a way for me to switch to pre-paid billing, to prevent overages in the future. The entire Google AI Studio billing and spend functionality is a UX nightmare. You have a lot of work to do to improve things on this front. But given that people have been complaining about this for years, my impression is that Google is such a bureaucratic nightmare that this will never get fully solved.
