Ask HN: Google Cloud limits you to 5 projects per billing account: why?
4 comments
Fraud.
You get X amount of quota (YY cores or ZZ bytes of GCS) per project. So while we charge you ASAP these days, if you can create 1000 projects you can have 25000 cores even if your fake credit card will bounce or bounce after it charges more than say $10.
It totally sucks to have to deal with this, but it basically costs almost $0 to get a fake credit card or a stolen one that'll pass for at least a few bucks. So this means your getting started experience has friction due to the folks that would like to burn our precious cores for whatever the most valuable coin mining is.
You get X amount of quota (YY cores or ZZ bytes of GCS) per project. So while we charge you ASAP these days, if you can create 1000 projects you can have 25000 cores even if your fake credit card will bounce or bounce after it charges more than say $10.
It totally sucks to have to deal with this, but it basically costs almost $0 to get a fake credit card or a stolen one that'll pass for at least a few bucks. So this means your getting started experience has friction due to the folks that would like to burn our precious cores for whatever the most valuable coin mining is.
I eventually figured it out: once I created a separate billing project not attached to the free trial credit and attached it to my account I was able to proceed.
I mean: totally understand the fraud issue. Incredibly deceptive error message though. Just say what you need so I can be objective about the next step I should take: I already had multiple credit cards and bank accounts attached to the payment profile, but it took me nearly 2 hours to figure out that "you've reached your quota" means "you need to create a billing account that doesn't have free credit attached".
Free advice, so worth what you paid: your experience here would be WORLDS better with a simple "Upgrade your account" button that runs the $10 charge or whatever you've decided is required for forward progress.
That said: once I was past that gate, progress was swift, so there is that. Worth the money: you just need to make it straightforward to take my money.
I mean: totally understand the fraud issue. Incredibly deceptive error message though. Just say what you need so I can be objective about the next step I should take: I already had multiple credit cards and bank accounts attached to the payment profile, but it took me nearly 2 hours to figure out that "you've reached your quota" means "you need to create a billing account that doesn't have free credit attached".
Free advice, so worth what you paid: your experience here would be WORLDS better with a simple "Upgrade your account" button that runs the $10 charge or whatever you've decided is required for forward progress.
That said: once I was past that gate, progress was swift, so there is that. Worth the money: you just need to make it straightforward to take my money.
I'll see if I can find the error string in the console about that (we should state the why). There are (used to be?) Upgrade your account things all over the place, but perhaps your setup was sufficiently mixed mode to have the limit yet not the prompt? Feel free to email me (contact in profile) your project number and I'll attach it to a bug.
I think I'd come across this problem a year ago. May be it was number of vms limit or something similar. Every time u deploy, a new vm is spun up. So try avoiding that. And temporary fix can be to override an existing app for 6th project. I'll try pasting a link later. Yes at least having an indicator of how much trial resources are available will help a developer instead of finding it out of blue.
Preventing stupid and costly mistakes. Same thing happens in AWS - you're limited to a relatively small number of resources until you ask for more. It's obvious for things that cost you money (stops you from reserving 1000 instances by accident), but could be applied for the same reason to all resources - you really want that many projects? Just ask for them.
Maybe you got an extra message like "watch out for Xxx as you create more projects" at the same time?
Maybe you got an extra message like "watch out for Xxx as you create more projects" at the same time?
The quotas are here for 3 reasons:
A) make sure that the hardware is available with the Google SREs (to make sure there are enough VMs, SSDs, etc...)
B) validation for fraud (billing fraud, or free coupons and do bitcoin mining with it) You could create 100 projects get 100*n quotas.
C) prevent human errors
Because of B), billing quota requests follow a standard quota request
B) validation for fraud (billing fraud, or free coupons and do bitcoin mining with it) You could create 100 projects get 100*n quotas.
C) prevent human errors
Because of B), billing quota requests follow a standard quota request
Also hoping if there is someone from the Cloud team lurking here on HN (looking at you @boulos) could I get an assist?