One of the things that is quite unnerving when you start using GCP is the billing. Unlike Azure (with your MSDN monthly credits), GCP just has a single promotion and that’s it; consequently, they don’t have any real way to have an automatic shut off instead of actually charging you (unlike to regular mails that I get from MS telling me they’ve suspended my account until next month).

When you start messing around with BigTable and BigQuery, you can eat up tens, or even hundreds of pounds very quickly, and you might not even realise you’ve done it.

GCP does have a warning, and you can set it to e-mail you at certain intervals within a spending limit:

However, this doesn’t include credit by default. That is, if Google give you a credit to start with (for example, because you’re trying out GCP or, I imagine, if you load your account up before-hand) then that doesn’t get included in your alerts.

Credit Checkbox

There is a checkbox that allows you to switch this behaviour, so that these credit totals are included:

And now you can see how much of your credit you’ve used:

And even receive e-mail warnings:

Disable Billing

One other thing you can do is to disable billing:

Unfortunately, this works differently from Azure, and effectively suspends you project: